Ronnie and Nancy (65 page)

Reagan said in 1979. “It is absolutely true when Cap Weinberger was only fourteen years old, he used to read the
Congressional Record
for pleasure. Cap has
a mind,
and a mind for finance; I’ve never seen anything like it.”29

Nonetheless, Reagan continued to rely heavily on his rich backers for advice and support. Ronnie and Nancy returned to Pacific Palisades almost every weekend during their first two years in Sacramento, and while Nancy had fittings at Galanos or lunched at the Bistro with the gals from the Group, Reagan got together with the Kitchen Cabinet. “They would meet on Saturdays up at the Reagan home,” Robert Tuttle said. “They’d just sit around and talk. They were a very congenial group of strong-willed guys. They would argue over things, there were disagreements, but basically they were all strong economic conservatives. Dad actually became assistant chief of protocol for the state. He didn’t really want the job, and sure enough along comes his first duty and he has a stomach attack and couldn’t fulfill it. We always teased him about it. So he promptly resigned.”

According to his son, Holmes Tuttle continued to spend at least half his time on politics all through Reagan’s time in Sacramento. “It got to the point,” Robert Tuttle said, “where our business was actually suffering because of it.”30

Stu Spencer elaborated: “Holmes did the things that had to be done.

During the first term, for example, when I said, ‘Hey, we got to get the legislature back,’ Holmes raised the money to let us go out and do the job.

And we got it and we won it. . . . He spent a lot of time. I mean, I’d come to him at midnight and say, ‘I need thirty grand for something.’ He’d say,

‘Go spend it!’ That’s the way he was.”31

“We were in and out of Sacramento fairly often,” said Hume,32 who, along with Tuttle, became heavily involved in the Task Force on Govern-Sacramento: 1967–1968

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ment Efficiency and Economy, which was established shortly after Reagan took office. This project, which brought some two hundred corporate executives to government agencies for six months to find ways to cut spending on everything from telephone bills to use of office space, was the flagship of Reagan’s promised Creative Society. It was also one of the more public ways in which the Kitchen Cabinet made its influence felt in Sacramento.

In April 1967, the
Los Angeles Times
ran an article by Carl Greenberg titled “Ronald Reagan’s ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ ”—the first documented use of this term in reference to the tycoons behind Reagan. Salvatori boasted that he talked to Reagan’s chief of staff, Phil Battaglia, once a week, and Tuttle, French Smith, Schreiber, and Monson admitted to frequent phone calls and meetings with the Governor. But each assured the
Times
that, as Leland Kaiser put it, “There’s one boss—and that’s Reagan. Nobody is controlling
him
.”33 Still, the impression lingered that somehow they were.

“When I got in office then, I must say those first days were very dreary, very dark,” Reagan recalled. “First of all, January and February in Sacramento are dreary and dull. Those damn tule fogs! And Nancy had to stay

[in Los Angeles] till the semester ended, with our son. . . . I was over in that
old
mansion. Oh, that was the most dreary,
dismal
place in the world.

It was just—to go home from the office to that—alone you know.” What’s more, Reagan complained, there was “controversy about everything,” and he was “constantly being attacked.”34

Even before the inauguration, Reagan’s team discovered that Brown had used accounting tricks to cover up an estimated $400 million deficit.35 In an effort to bring the budget under control, Reagan ordered a 10 percent across-the-board cut in spending for all government departments, including the state’s much-heralded higher-education system. He also proposed charging tuition at state universities and colleges for the first time and, to make matters worse, in late January he helped engineer the firing of University of California president Clark Kerr by the Board of Regents, who were dissatisfied with his handling of the ongoing student unrest. Within days Reagan, who had railed against campus “beatniks and malcontents” during his campaign, was hung in effigy at Sacramento State, and protestors at U.C.-Davis staged a mock burial.

California was “the laughingstock of the nation, as far as the academic community is concerned,” declared the Democratic speaker of the State Assembly, Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh.36

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Uproar followed uproar. In February, when Battaglia asked state employees to work on Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays to save money, only 2 percent showed up. In March, Reagan asked for a $1 billion tax hike—then the largest tax increase ever proposed by a governor in the nation’s history—including higher rates on personal income, corporate profits, retail sales, liquor, and cigarettes.37 Conservatives in his own party howled even louder than the opposition. But Reagan fought back, turning to Asa Call for help in getting corporate chieftains to rein in their lobbyists.38 Tuttle supplied the funds for a series of ninety-second filmed messages that were distributed to local TV stations, a new technique in political public relations that upset reporters, who felt they were being bypassed.

Nofziger told them that was the point. “It’s not a happy picture,” Reagan informed his audience in the first message aired. “Our state has been looted and drained of its financial resources in a manner unique in our history,”

he said, laying the blame for the state’s fiscal crisis at the feet of the previous administration with his usual dramatic flair. The public loved it, and his poll numbers remained high.39 After extensive wrangling between Reagan and Unruh, the tax increase and a record $5 billion budget squeaked through the legislature.

During these same few months, Reagan was confronted with what he said were the two most difficult decisions he would make as Governor. In April he refused a plea for clemency from a black man who had murdered a white police officer while out on bail for a robbery charge; it was the first execution in the state in four years (and would be the last—the California Supreme Court overturned the state’s capital punishment law in Reagan’s second term).40 Also in April, State Senator Anthony Beilenson—whose lawyer father, Laurence, had arranged the 1952 MCA waiver from SAG—

introduced the Therapeutic Abortion Act, which permitted abortion in cases of rape or incest, and when the physical or mental health of the mother was endangered. Reagan anguished over his decision for months while being pulled from all sides. His top aides were split, as was the Kitchen Cabinet, and Catholic friends, including the Wilsons and Betsy Bloomingdale, made their views known to both Ronnie and Nancy. The archdiocese of Los Angeles had hired Spencer-Roberts, and the firm arranged a meeting between Reagan and Francis Cardinal McIntyre, which only added to the controversy. Nancy suggested that Ronnie consult with Loyal, whom she called every day, according to her stepbrother, “to talk about the children or to get his advice.” As a physician, Loyal approved of
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legalizing abortion, and Richard Davis believes that this was one instance where the doctor’s purported influence was real.41

Reagan finally signed what was then the country’s most liberal abortion law, on June 14, 1967 (and promptly wrote a letter to Betsy Bloomingdale asking her to forgive him). A year later he told a reporter that he had done “a lot of soul-searching” and had ultimately concluded that the legal concept of self-defense meant that a “woman had a right to defend herself from her unborn child.”42 (Legal abortions in California would jump from 518 in 1967 to 199,089 in 1980, and the Governor and his wife blamed psychiatrists for making a mockery of the law by recommending an abortion for any woman who claimed she might become depressed or suicidal if she gave birth to an unwanted child.)43

These early policy decisions surprised and disappointed Reagan’s most right-wing supporters. “I really think that he is taking us for granted,” said State Senator John Schmitz, a John Birch Society member and one of the few Republican legislators willing to criticize the Governor publicly. “As far as I’m concerned the words don’t match up with the action.” As Schmitz and other conservatives saw it, Reagan was making the government bigger, not smaller. Reagan responded in a late 1967 interview with CBS’s Harry Reasoner: “I think we’ve got some narrow groups on both sides of the spectrum, who are well-meant and sincere,” he said. “But I think that sometimes they would rather see someone go down in glorious defeat, jump off the cliff with flag flying, than recognize the practicality of trying to promote your philosophy and get it a step at a time. I try to point out to Republicans that it has taken the opposition thirty-five years to accomplish many of the things we’re opposing. We can’t believe that someplace out of the sunrise a man on a white horse is going to wave a wand and, if we get elected, change everything all at once.”44

Nancy had an even harder time than Ronnie adjusting to life in Sacramento, where it seemed that her every move was scrutinized by the local press. She told
Hollywood Reporter
columnist George Christy, “When Ronnie was first elected, someone said that it wouldn’t be much of a change for us, that politics was just like the picture business, that both were such public lives. But they were wrong. Politics is a completely different life. In the picture business you’re protected somewhat—by the studio, by your producer, and so on. In politics you aren’t protected in any way. You don’t belong for a night to a theater audience; you belong to everyone all the time.”45

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Her first run-in with the press came when the Reagans moved out of the Governor’s Mansion three months after they had moved in. Nancy hated living in the old gingerbread pile, which had been built for a Gold Rush merchant in 1877 and occupied by governors and their families since the turn of the century. It was already rat-infested and creaking by the time Earl Warren lived there in the 1940s, and Goodwin Knight’s wife would chide legislators who came for dinner about the need for a new official residence. Although the three-story, white frame structure had six Italian marble fireplaces in its reception rooms, beautifully carved panel-ing and moldings, and a lovely cupola rising above its mansard roof, it stood on a major thoroughfare in the middle of downtown and faced two gas stations and a motel. Because of the traffic, Earl Warren Jr. remembered, it was “like living over an earthquake fault.”46 Nancy worried about the Skipper being run over or the whole place going up in flames. When the fire alarm went off one afternoon that first winter, the fire marshal who came to the house told Nancy that the only way to get out of her son’s room was to break a window with a dresser drawer. “That was it,” said Nancy.47

At their own expense, the Reagans rented a six-bedroom Tudor-style house with a pool on 45th Street, a wealthy enclave on the eastern edge of the city. They called it the Executive Residence and had stationery and matchbooks made up with that moniker. When the owner put the house up for sale two years later, seventeen California businessmen, including Tuttle, Dart, Hume, Earle Jorgensen, the Cook brothers, the Fluor brothers, and Irene Dunne’s husband, Z. Wayne Griffin, purchased and remodeled it for $170,000. The Reagans continued to pay $1,250 a month in rent, until the state took over the payments in 1970.48 Marion Jorgensen pointed out that when the group sold the house after Reagan left office,

“We all made $5,000 profit—we never felt Ronnie and Nancy owed us anything.”49 Nonetheless, the press carped.

Reporters also carped when Nancy turned to her friends for help in furnishing the house and arranged for their gifts to be tax-deductible.

Betsy gave her an English-style mahogany dining room table that seated twenty-four, and Marion provided the chairs. Virginia Milner, the wife of steel heir Reese Llewellyn Milner and a member of the Colleagues, donated Nancy’s favorite piece—an antique French Regency fruitwood secretary—and other items reportedly totaling $17,000.50 “The furniture belongs to the state, not to us,” Nancy explained to George Christy,
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“but wouldn’t you know that some politicians tried to make a brouhaha of it.”51

Meanwhile, Reagan asked Leland Kaiser to raise $500,000 to build a new Governor’s Mansion. The legislature had gone along with Pat Brown when he submitted plans for a glass-and-marble palazzo that would have cost $750,000; the only reason it wasn’t built was that there were disagreements over its location. But Reagan’s effort came under heavy attack for relying on private funding, and Kaiser compounded the problem by sending a letter to lobbyists asking them for contributions. The project was temporarily shelved, and Kaiser was eased out of the Kitchen Cabinet.52 However, Nancy kept on complaining—“When I go to other states and see how the governors live, I’m embarrassed”—and the press kept on carping.53

Nothing wounded Nancy more than a June 1968
Saturday Evening
Post
profile by Joan Didion, the dryly brilliant chronicler of California’s history and society. Didion was the sister-in-law of Dominick Dunne, a good friend of the Bloomingdales’, and Nancy thought the day they spent together at the 45th Street residence had gone well. Unbeknownst to Nancy, Didion had once stayed at the Governor’s Mansion with Earl Warren’s daughter and considered it her “favorite house in the world.”54 It is hardly surprising that she mocked the suburban Tudor Nancy was so proud of as “a stage set . . . for a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”55 Nancy was furious at Didion for implying that her constant smiling was nothing more than the obvious insincerity of a second-rate actress. From then on, whenever Didion’s name came up, Nancy would snap, “Would she have liked it better if I had snarled?” Because of Didion’s skill and reputation this piece would set the tone for much of the coverage of Nancy that followed—at least that is what Nancy and her friends believed.