Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [124]
Powell and Allyson were both major stars in the late 1940s: after a decade of crooning and swooning with Ruby Keeler in Warner Bros. musicals, he had miraculously transformed himself into a leading man in noir classics such as RKO’s 1944 Murder, My Sweet; she had been signed by MGM in 1942, and had gone from hit to hit, starting with Girl Crazy with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Both were from the wrong side of the tracks—he from the Ozarks, she from the Bronx—and both loved life among the swells. Louis B. Mayer gave her away at their wedding in the Holmby Hills house of Johnny Green, MGM’s musical director. Powell played polo and golf, owned a yacht, which he sailed with Humphrey Bogart, and piloted his own plane.
In 1947, Powell and Allyson bought a Tudor-style mansion on Copa del Oro Drive in Bel Air, and Dick, according to June, “began ordering beautiful old oaken pieces directly from England. And when everything was in place I couldn’t imagine it any other way—it was indeed like living in an old English castle complete with swords, shields, armor, mugs, and even a wishing well outside.”30
“Ronnie and Jane and George and Julie Murphy were among our first dinner guests,” Allyson remembered.
Jane asked me to show her around the house so we could both get away from the men talking politics. I took Jane upstairs and showed her our separate bedroom suites. I am glad to say that Richard did not use his much, but he liked having a bedroom in masculine colors—brown and beige. . . . My bedroom suite was in a misty rose.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House And it had a niche for my collection of stuffed animals, witches, and, especially, Raggedy Ann dolls.
Back downstairs Jane Wyman and I joined the men, and Julie Murphy, around the fireplace. It was a riot to listen to Ronnie, a staunch Democrat, try to convert Richard while Richard argued just as hard to turn Ronnie into a Republican. I figured the only way to get into this conversation was to pop some basic questions at Ronnie.
He answered me carefully, methodically. When Ronnie got through explaining something to me, Jane Wyman leaned over and said, “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.”. . .
Jane Wyman seemed more upset with her husband’s obsession with politics than I. I tried to make her laugh. “He’ll outgrow it,” I told her. To her it wasn’t funny. But even more annoying to her was the fact that it took Ronnie so long to make up his mind about anything she asked him.31
The Reagans and the Murphys, Allyson recalled, were among a half-dozen “important and affable” couples who entertained one another regularly. This close-knit group included the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wife, Frances, a former Powers model; tire heir Leonard Firestone and his wife, Polly; and drugstore tycoon Justin Dart and his wife, Jane Bryan, a co-star of Ronnie and Jane’s in Brother Rat and its sequel, who had retired from acting after marrying Dart on New Year’s Eve 1939. Bridge and square-dancing were among the group’s favorite pastimes.
Except for Reagan, the men were all Republicans. Firestone and Dart would later be members of Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet, but back then Dart tried to avoid talking politics with the future Governor and President.
“When we’d go out with Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, my wife would say, ‘For God’s sake, no politics, please!,’ ” Dart said years later. “The night we first met we fought like cats and dogs.”32
Dart, who was forty in 1947 and a millionaire several