Ronnie and Nancy (62 page)

By September, polls were showing Reagan as the clear front-runner, but Christopher as more likely to beat Brown. So much mail was pouring in—

hundreds of letters a day, according to Kathy Randall Davis, the Spencer-Roberts secretary assigned to Reagan—that she had to hide some of it from the still undeclared candidate in order to prevent him from trying to answer
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every letter himself, as was his custom. “He and Mrs. Reagan had this thing about mail,” she later wrote, “they almost fought over who would get to open it.”114

It was a thrilling time for Ronnie and Nancy. She started wearing a

“Reagan for Governor” button even on her evening clothes, and had the housekeeper, Anne Allman, the gardener, her hairdresser, and the butcher at the Brentwood Country Market wearing them, too. Seven-year-old Ron plastered his bedroom walls with Reagan bumper stickers. Only Patti was unenthusiastic about the turn her father’s career had taken, which left her overwhelmed with the feeling that she had little control over her own life. At Christmas that year, Patti was so sulky that Loyal pulled her aside and said, “I want you to show how proud you are of your father. You back him up, do you understand me?”115

Patti felt that her father had become more remote than ever since his big speech for Goldwater. “Often, I’d come into a room and he’d look up from his note cards as though he wasn’t sure who I was.” Her relationship with her mother had not improved either as she entered her teen years. There were scenes at I. Magnin and Saks over clothes, and shouting matches at home. Patti said her mother listened in on her phone calls with boys and tore up her emotionally dark, typically teenage poetry. She saw her relationship with her mother as a constant battle. When her father came home from a campaign trip or a day of work on
Death Valley Days
, he always dismissed her accusations against her mother. “Patti . . . what is it with you?

Your mother does everything she can for you and all you do is talk back to her and hurt her. . . . All she wants is to have a daughter. She looks at friends of hers, like Mrs. Bloomingdale, and how nice a time she has with Lisa, and she doesn’t understand why she can’t have that with you.”116

“All our classmates knew that Patti didn’t like her mother,” said Liza Lerner, a daughter of the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who was a friend of Patti’s at John Thomas Dye. “When we started sixth grade, Patti was the most developed girl in the class, and she was insecure and self-conscious about it.

You have to realize that all thirteen-year-olds complain about their mothers, but Patti particularly had a thing about hers. I would go over there sometimes in the afternoon, and we’d go into Patti’s room and stay there. She used to complain that her mother would leave the intercom on and listen in to what was going on in her room. My impression was that it was a very disconnected family. Every time I went over there, her father was just sitting around reading the newspaper—he didn’t seem very outgoing to me. And 3 4 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy seemed like someone with blind ambition, who just had a mission, and anything that got in her way . . . When you’re a kid, you get a visceral sense of things. She wasn’t a warm person. She was a cold person. I knew the Wicks slightly better. Mary Jane Wick was an outgoing, sweet woman, and Mr. Wick was a nice guy. Their house was a more normal, inviting place to be than the Reagans’.”117

“I don’t know what it was with Patti and me,” Nancy Reagan confided years later. “Maybe the way I looked, the way I dressed—I don’t know.

When she was in seventh grade at John Thomas Dye, the principal said, ‘I think Patti should go to this doctor.’ So we went to this psychiatrist, a crippled woman, I remember. ‘I think you’d better get Patti away from you for a year, because she has a real fixation about her mother.’ That’s what she told Ronnie and me.”118

Nancy had hoped that Patti would go to Marlborough or Westlake, the two most social private girls schools in Los Angeles, but they wouldn’t take her because she failed eighth grade at John Thomas Dye. Patti wanted to go to a public school, because they were coed and integrated, but Nancy would not hear of it. After Patti deliberately botched the entrance exam at the exclusive Bishop School in La Jolla because it was all-girls and required uniforms, Betsy Bloomingdale suggested the Santa Catalina School near Santa Barbara, which was run by nuns but attended by girls from some of San Francisco’s WASPiest old families. But the nuns rejected Patti, too. In September 1965 she entered the coed Orme School, located in the desert outside Flagstaff, Arizona, which was also a functioning cattle ranch. She promptly grew her hair long, had her ears pierced, tightened her jeans and shortened her skirts, and took to wearing thick black eye-liner and white lipstick. “When you’ve been dressed like Little Bo Peep for years,” she later explained, “the slut look is very desirable.”119

According to Patti, just before she left for boarding school, she had overheard Nancy telling Stu Spencer that Reagan’s campaign literature should say that Ronnie had two children and that no mention should be made of Reagan’s first marriage. Spencer, who felt that Rockefeller’s divorce had cost him the nomination, agreed with Nancy. This was particularly hurtful to Maureen, who had been remarried, to a Marine lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Pendelton, and who liked nothing more than talking politics with her father over dinner. An enthusiastic conservative herself, she had been a full-time volunteer for Goldwater and had been encouraging her father to run for office since he switched parties. Michael,
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on the other hand, had again been cast out by the family. After graduating from Judson with honors and being rewarded with a new Ford Galaxie 500 by his father, he made it through only one year at Arizona State, and was working the night shift loading freight for a trucking company at the Port of Los Angeles.120

“The consultants were very nervous about Dad’s previous marriage, and the very clear message I was getting was that Michael and I were not to be involved in any way in the campaign,” Maureen wrote. “In fact, Stu Spencer later suggested to my husband that I dig a hole and pull the dirt in over me until after the election.” When she called her father to discuss the situation, he told her, “If you pay someone to manage a campaign . . .

then you’ve got to give them the authority to do it as they see fit.”121 He agreed to let her introduce him at an event put on by the San Diego Federation of Republican Women, and he let it pass when Maureen, who could be as feisty as her mother, discarded the text prepared by Spencer-Roberts. It would have required her to say that her father had two children, named Patti and Ron, and
that
, she wrote, “would have been the ultimate humiliation.”122

Ronnie and Nancy saw in 1966 at the Bloomingdales’. “It was the first year I did a New Year’s Eve party, and I had champagne, caviar, and chili,”

said Betsy Bloomingdale, reeling off the guest list from her party book.

“Irene Dunne, the Lohmans—she’s Beverly Morsey now, the Dominick Dunnes, Bill Frye, and Jim Wharton. And I had everybody’s children—

that was the idea, to keep it small and family.” Dominick Dunne, who was a producer then, and his wife, Lenny, were on the Beverly Hills A-list, and Lew Lohman was a rich oilman from Texas whose wife was in the Colleagues.123

Four days later Ronald Reagan formally announced his candidacy for governor in a televised broadcast from Pacific Palisades. Nancy stood at his side, looking up at him lovingly. The candidate was wearing a dark-green-and-navy tartan jacket, a white shirt, a dark tie, and black slacks; his wife wore a suit of fire-engine red, a color that guaranteed she would stand out.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Reagan began, “for the last six months I’ve been traveling up and down this state meeting as many of you as I could—answering questions and asking a few. There isn’t any secret as to why I’ve been doing this: I have said I’ll be a candidate for Governor once I’ve found the answers to a few questions myself—mainly about my acceptability to 3 4 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House you. Who would like to be Governor isn’t important. Who the people would like to be Governor is very important.”124

The presentation seemed deliberately Rooseveltian in its homey majesty, from the direct appeal to the people right down to the crackling logs in the living room fireplace behind him. As Lou Cannon writes,

“Reagan found his true calling in politics. Reagan was a competent actor with a limited range. As a politician, however, he was so enormously gifted that he seemed a president-in-waiting almost as soon as he began campaigning.”125

Reagan “fielded a variety of questions with impeccable nonchalance,”

said
The New York Times
about the press conference that followed at the Statler-Hilton downtown. Then came a reception for 150 reporters, a private party for the Kitchen Cabinet, and another reception for the Friends of Ronald Reagan, whose numbers had swelled to six thousand. The campaign now began in earnest. To comply with the equal-airtime laws, Reagan took a leave from
Death Valley Days
; Robert Taylor and John Wayne agreed to fill in for him. He even gave in to flying for the first time in some twenty-five years—“Holmes told him, ‘If you want to run, you gotta fly,’ ”

Betty Adams recalled.126 The campaign chartered a DC-3 for trips to Northern California, but Reagan used a bus or chauffeured car in the south.127 Nancy accompanied him almost everywhere.

So did a team of Republican psychology professors hired by Spencer-Roberts with the Kitchen Cabinet’s approval. Stanley Plog and Kenneth Holden had recently started a company called Behavior Science Corporation of Los Angeles, and they would come to be seen as the precursors of today’s campaign consultants, who mold, advise, and direct a candidate every step of the way. “We were with him every waking moment during the entire campaign, one of the three of us,” said Plog, referring to himself, Holden, and their assistant. “You’d fly up on the plane with him to Sacramento. You’d follow him into the restroom before he goes on stage, giving him a last-minute bit of advice. We were over at his home a lot, talking over issues with him, feeding [him] things, telling him, ‘Look, here’s three alternate programs that could grow out of your belief about this. Now which one do you like? You choose the one you like, and then we’ll develop information and support it.’” Plog added, “The primary thing was to educate him on the politics and issues of California because, all along, that guy has been focused on national politics.”128

After being holed up with Reagan for three days in a borrowed Malibu
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beach house, Plog and Holden made thirteen black books, each covering an important state issue, with information on five-by-eight cards that Reagan could remove and insert into a speech. “The speeches were all his, we didn’t touch that,” Plog said. “His short little one-liners all came from him. His ability to ad-lib in a spot was just fabulous; he could handle any situation.”129 To complement Spencer-Roberts’s Citizen Politician concept, Plog and Holden dubbed Reagan’s program the Creative Society.

The idea was to counteract the perception of conservatives’ always being against something—welfare, busing, Russia—and to reinforce Reagan’s natural optimism and good humor. “Our problems are many but our capacity for solving them is immense,” Reagan told his audiences. “The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal,” he would joke, “with a healthy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.”130

Reagan lost his cool only once during the months leading up to the June primary, at a convention of the National Negro Republican Assembly in Santa Monica, when Christopher and a minor candidate implied that he was a racist for opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” Reagan barked. Then, flipping one of his note cards into the audience, he stalked off the stage, muttering “sons of bitches” under his breath, and drove home. Lyn Nofziger, his press secretary, followed him and, with Nancy, persuaded him to return for the cocktail party that followed the debate. Henry Salvatori was so upset when he read of the incident the next day that he told Nofziger he thought Reagan was “not smart enough or stable enough to be governor.” He threatened to get former governor Goodwin Knight to run against Reagan, but Nofziger managed to talk him out of it, and he didn’t say anything to Ronnie or Nancy.131

In contrast to Salvatori’s prima donna behavior—he also had run-ins with Spencer-Roberts and Plog and Holden—Holmes Tuttle never wavered in his support for or belief in Reagan through all the ups and downs of the campaign. In addition to constantly calming down Salvatori, he was besieged with phone calls from angry Birchers who thought Reagan was abandoning the cause, as well as fretful moderates who warned that Reagan was an irredeemable right-winger. (Among the most adamant of the latter was Congressman Alphonzo Bell.) “It was a lonely and difficult time for my father,” Robert Tuttle told me. “Because, of the three original Reagan supporters, he was the one who really worked day to day on the campaign.

Mom and Dad were both very involved. They’d go down to the Reagan for Governor headquarters on Wilshire and Vermont, near the old I. Magnin’s, 3 4 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and just work their hearts out. A lot of his close friends supported George Christopher, and would say to him, ‘Why are you supporting this actor?

Look at what Goldwater did to the party. Now you’re going to do it again.’

But he managed to continually reach out to the other side and say, ‘If Christopher wins, we’ll be on board the next day.’ And he got
them
to say,

‘If Reagan wins,
we’ll
be on board.’ And many of those people—the most prominent one was Justin Dart—came right on board.’”132

Reagan beat Christopher with a solid 65 percent of the vote, and several top Christopher backers were enlisted into the Kitchen Cabinet, including Dart and Leonard Firestone; Ted Cummings, the founder of the Food Giant supermarket chain and a leader in the Los Angeles Jewish community; and Arch Monson Jr., owner of a San Francisco–based theater supplies business and a prominent member of the exclusive and influential Bohemian Club. Taft Schreiber, who had also supported Christopher, was made vice chairman of the campaign’s finance committee, and Jules Stein stepped up his behind-the-scenes activities. (Lew Wasserman raised money for Brown, another strike against him in Nancy’s book.) After a public unity meeting of the two candidates’ financial supporters at the Los Angeles Press Club, Henry Salvatori told reporters that Reagan’s campaign had cost a little more than $500,000, compared to Christopher’s $450,000, and that the combined forces were prepared to raise up to $700,000 for the general election.133