Ronnie and Nancy (74 page)

Although no one realized it at the time, among the corporate executives at the Royal Albert Hall that night in November 1969 was Denis Thatcher, who went home and told his wife, Margaret, then minister of education in the government of Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, how impressed he had been by the California governor’s ideas and delivery. Reagan had received a standing ovation, apparently a tribute that only former prime minister Harold Macmillan had ever received. “I started to cry,” Nancy later said. “I noticed a woman next to me also crying, and I was touched that she’d been as moved as I was.”82

“That was the English part of the trip,” Betsy Bloomingdale said. “I was in charge of the French part.” The high point of their Paris stay was a dinner in the Reagans’ honor at Versailles, hosted by its then curator, Gerald van der Kemp, and his American wife, Florence. “I had called Florence,” Betsy Bloomingdale said, “because Nancy had always been so fascinated by the stories of the dinners we’d gone to in Versailles. And being a big Republican anyway, Florence was thrilled to give a dinner for the Governor of California. . . . The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were 4 1 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House there, and a lot of terribly sophisticated French people—you know, Alexis de Redé, Ghislaine de Polignac, all that crowd that we’d known for years.

Real sophisticates. So nobody really cared who Ronald Reagan was. He was a nice, handsome-looking actor from Hollywood, I think they thought, with a very pretty wife and what have you. But Ronnie was fabulous that night. He got up—did a little bit in French—and then really started to speak. And after dinner they all knew who Ronald Reagan was.

They were
mad
for Ronald Reagan.”83

For Nancy, nothing compared with meeting the woman for whom a king had given up his throne. The aging Windsors, who were renowned for their exquisite taste in everything from decor to dogs, held sway over international society from a
petit palais
in the Bois de Boulogne. “The Duchess was the star of the evening, the absolute star,” Nancy told
Women’s Wear Daily
’s Jody Jacobs. “Her yellow Givenchy dress over pants was so beautiful even Ronnie mentioned it. . . . It’s not just that she looks so good. It’s her charm and the way she has of making you feel you’re the most important person in the world when she’s talking to you.” Nancy said of the Duke, “Oh, he was wonderful. . . . He told Ronnie, ‘I’m completely behind what you stand for.’ ”84 Jacobs had hoped to conduct her interview with Nancy at Winfield House, but Lee nixed that. According to Jacobs, Lee said that “she had spent too much time and effort on the house to have anyone but herself be the first one interviewed there.”85

A year later, at the 1970 Republican Governors’ Conference in Sun Valley, Nancy made a new friend, Katharine Graham. The shy, vaguely dowdy publishing heiress, who had taken over
The Washington Post
after her husband’s suicide seven years earlier, and the fashion-conscious former actress were an unlikely match, but they seemed to have an immediate affinity for each other. They had been encouraged to seek each other out by an even more unlikely go-between. “I must say, we kept this rather a dark secret,” Graham told me in 1998, sitting beneath a Diego Rivera painting in the drawing room of her R Street mansion. “Because what we actually did was meet through Truman Capote. And both of us felt slightly embarrassed—you know, because people kept asking all through the Reagan years, ‘How did you happen to meet? How did you happen to be friends?’ And at that point, for some reason, we didn’t think it was suitable. I don’t exactly know why. But we never much said that in fact we did meet through Capote. After
In Cold Blood
he was very interested in the death penalty, and he had gone out to California in pursuit of death row
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interviews. In the course of doing that he met Governor and Mrs. Reagan.

He said to me, ‘I know you won’t believe me, honey, but you’d really like them,’ and encouraged me to look them up. It happened quite accidentally, because I was invited to speak at the Republican governors’ meeting in Sun Valley, on a panel about the press. I flew out there all alone and feeling very unsure of myself—I’d only gone to work in ’63. At one of the first receptions—it was a terribly cold winter night and everyone went out to the dinner in sleds—I met the Reagans. And because of Truman, you know, Nancy and I got to know each other.”86

“Truman Capote came to the house for lunch a few times in Sacramento,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you really should know Kay Graham. If you knew her, you’d like her.’ Ronnie used to do a funny imitation of him. So we went to Sun Valley, and I walked into this lodge where we were having dinner. And there was Kay standing in front of the fireplace. So I walked up to her and said, ‘Well, I think it’s time we really met.’”87

California’s First Lady had become much more sure of herself by the end of her husband’s first term. Since 1968 she had been hosting annual poolside parties at the Executive Residence for legislators and their wives with entertainment provided by Hollywood friends such as Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, and Red Skelton. She had found a cause she loved in the Foster Grandparents Program, which arranged for lonely senior citizens to spend time with institutionalized children. As she told the
Sacramento Union
, “I think it is wonderful because it benefits both sides—the older people whose families are grown, and the children who receive an extra amount of love and attention.”88 The federally funded program had been started by Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver in 1965, and was still quite small when Nancy became aware of it on a visit to Pacific State Hospital. She soon took charge, and eventually expanded the program to all state hospitals. She also made regular visits to soldiers wounded in Vietnam at military hospitals around the state. “Hospital visiting is a natural thing for me to do,” she said. “I used to watch my father operate.”89 After these visits, she would call the servicemen’s parents, wives, or girlfriends and pass on messages. These activities were well suited to Nancy’s nurse’s side—they also were her way of showing her support for Ronnie’s very vocal pro-war stance. On October 15, 1970, as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched on Washington to demand that Nixon pull out of Vietnam, the Governor’s 4 1 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House press office invited TV crews to accompany the First Lady on a visit to an Army hospital in San Francisco. “It’s a symbolic visit,” Nancy admitted. “I want the boys here to know there are a lot of people in California who are grateful to them.”90

Reagan’s decision to seek reelection surprised no one, as he said in a fifteen-minute televised speech on March 10, 1970. Less than two weeks earlier he had been forced to call upon the National Guard again, when students at U.C.-Santa Barbara, shouting “Death to corporations” and

“Burn, baby, burn,” set fire to a Bank of America branch. The attacks on businesses continued on and off for three months, and at one point a frustrated Reagan snapped at a reporter, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”91 Nancy told columnist George Christy,

“From a woman’s standpoint, it frightens me when I see students shouting obscenities; I think of Hitler’s Nazi youth movement.”92 “Every time you and Ronnie open your mouths you echo my thoughts,” a supportive Lillian Gish wrote Nancy from New York.93

Reagan was opposed by the Democrats’ State Assembly leader, Jesse Unruh, who opened his campaign on Labor Day weekend by taking two busloads of reporters to the gates of Henry Salvatori’s estate in Bel Air. As the TV cameras rolled, Unruh asserted that a property-tax-relief bill proposed by Reagan would save his wealthy friend $4,113 a year, whereupon Salvatori, in tennis whites, appeared and yelled through the gates, “Oh, you ass! Is this the way you have to get your publicity?” Grace was right behind him, shouting, “We worked for the money to pay for it!”94

Unruh was playing on the lingering perception that the Kitchen Cabinet was running the state—he also staged a showy scene outside the 45th Street house to remind voters that it had been bought by a group headed by Holmes Tuttle and Jaquelin Hume—but his antics backfired. “In a single stroke Unruh had revived the image of ‘Big Daddy,’ the domineering political bully who had no respect for the rights of others,” Lou Cannon observes. “Californians value both their holidays and their privacy, and they identified with the nice-looking elderly couple whose castle had been invaded on a holiday by the dread Unruh. Rarely has a self-inflicted wound so thoroughly undermined what might have been a promising campaign.”95

“We just stood on Ron’s record, and ran on it and ran on it and ran on it, and we won again,” said Tuttle. “Of course, we didn’t win by a million votes, but we won by over a half million.”96 Despite a recent hospitalization
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for his chronic stomach problems, Tuttle co-chaired the campaign with Tom Reed. Tuttle’s fund-raising partner, Justin Dart, replaced Salvatori as finance chairman, but in most respects 1970 was a carbon copy of 1966, with Hume heading the Northern California effort and Ed Mills serving as Tuttle’s deputy in the south. Spencer-Roberts managed the campaign, and Neil Reagan’s agency, McCann-Erickson, handled the advertising. However, there was one big new name on the campaign’s organizational chart, Frank Sinatra, who was a co-chair of Californians for Reagan, which was made up of Democrats and independents.97

It is commonly thought that Sinatra, who was once so far left that both MGM and MCA dropped him in the blacklist days, had switched sides after his buddy President Kennedy opted to stay with Bing Crosby instead of him on a 1962 visit to Palm Springs. According to Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had told Sinatra, “We can’t have the president sleeping in the same house where Sam Giancana slept.”98 “The Kennedy slight hurt him deeply,” his daughter Tina Sinatra told me. “But he did
not
sledgehammer his helipad when he found out the President wasn’t coming, and the new guesthouse had been built for my sister, brother, and me, not Kennedy.” In Tina’s view, her father had little truck with “the far-right Minutemen—John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Ward Bond,” who were Reagan’s most faithful Hollywood supporters. He saw his role, she said, as “nudging Ronnie toward the middle. . . . I also think he thought the Democratic Party was going to take a major nosedive. Once he went off to the Reagan camp, he stayed there, but he remained a registered Democrat until the day he died. He loved politics. He loved to put his money where his mouth was, to entertain and put his voice into the electoral process, to help make something happen.”99

Sinatra had made a few appearances for Reagan in 1966, after taking of-fense at Pat Brown’s an-actor-killed-Lincoln ad. This time around, he was angry at Jesse Unruh, who had been a major Bobby Kennedy booster, for not doing enough to carry California for his friend Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In the intervening years Sinatra had seen more of the Reagans socially through the Annenbergs and the Deutsches; the latter had been spending New Year’s at the singer’s desert compound since the early 1960s. He went all-out for Reagan in 1970, staging glitzy benefits throughout the state, usually with Dean Martin at his side, and raising more than $500,000 of the campaign’s $3.5 million total.100

On election night in November, the Reagans went to the Jorgensens’

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House before proceeding to the Biltmore, as they had four years earlier. “Ronnie decided it was good luck,” explained Marion Jorgensen. “So when he ran a second time, Nancy called me up. I said, ‘Oh, are we having the cocktail party?’ She said, ‘Yes, but there will be a few more people.’ It was astonishing how many more popped up that night.” Almost the entire Kitchen Cabinet was on hand this time, as well as outgoing Nevada governor Paul Laxalt, who had become a close ally of Reagan’s; the Deavers and Nancy Reynolds; and Gloria and Jimmy Stewart. Marion made a point of having not only the same food—veal stew and coconut cake—but also the same employees from the same caterer.101

Demonstrators carrying Vietcong flags hurled four-letter words and oranges at Ronald Reagan as he was sworn in for a second term on the steps of the capitol, on January 4, 1971. But that didn’t stop the Governor, who was only a month away from his sixtieth birthday, from completing his address.

“They’re like mosquitoes and flies. They’re part of the world, and you have to put up with them, I guess,” he said of the protesters who now plagued most of his public appearances.102 For them, he was now “Ronald Ray-gun,”

a term that Joan Baez had coined at Woodstock in 1969.

Nancy had decided that the inaugural ball should be white-tie, and had asked Sinatra to produce the inaugural gala at the Sacramento Municipal Auditorium. She also asked Frank, who was between marriages to flower-child actress Mia Farrow and former Las Vegas showgirl Barbara Marx, to escort Patti to the ball. Years later, after Kitty Kelley alleged that Nancy had a long-term affair with the crooner that began around this time, Patti told an interviewer, “When I read about my mother and Sinatra in Kitty’s book, I thought, Well, God, I spent this whole evening with him and he never came on to me. Of course, I was jailbait at the time, but he was very gentlemanly. We talked about music; he was going to teach me to sing. And then I thought, Maybe he did come on to me and I just didn’t recognize it. . . . Maybe there was something to those singing lessons after all.”103

By then Patti was a freshman at Northwestern University, her grandfather’s alma mater. That wasn’t why she chose it; she had thought her English teacher from Orme was going to get a job there, but that didn’t work out, and he ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. Her father had spoken at her high school commencement the previous June, and she had agreed to make her debut at Las Madrinas, the top cotillion for Los Ange-Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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les society girls, in December to appease her mother, but in Evanston she drew the line at pledging for a sorority. Instead, she befriended the very person her father had warned her to avoid, student body president Eva Jefferson, who he had been told was a radical black activist. When Patti finally managed to fly to Philadelphia to see her paramour, he picked her up at the airport with his wife and kids. He then promised her a rendezvous in Chicago, but didn’t show up on the appointed weekend.104