Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [125]
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tor who could “get on his feet and influence people.” Reagan, he observed,
“can sell people on what’s good for them, not just what they want.”33
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Like Reagan, Justin Whitlock Dart was Illinois-born, but he had grown up in Chicago’s expensive North Shore suburbs. His father was a successful shirt salesman. “He worked a circuit, going from store to store,” Dart recalled. “And he worked like hell. When I was eight years old—in 1915, or whenever it was—he was making $15,000 a year! In those days, that was upper, upper, upper middle class.”34
In the late 1920s, while Reagan was caddieing for Charles Walgreen, Dart was courting the chain drugstore king’s daughter at Northwestern University, where he played tackle on the football team and was twice selected All-Big-Ten. He was senior-class president, president of his fraternity, and already something of a “kingmaker,” as he later put it. “Every year, four or five of us would sit down and decide who the class presidents were going to be,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1982. “And then we’d start campaigning. Our guys always won.”35
He married Ruth Walgreen in October 1929, the month the stock market crashed, and went to work in the stockroom of one of her father’s stores.
Three years later he was head of operations for the entire 345-store chain, and he kept the company profitable during the Depression by streamlining its purchasing and distribution systems and ruthlessly closing laggard stores.
He also took credit for such marketing innovations as moving the prescription counter to the back of the store so that customers had to pass display shelves holding Walgreen’s 25,000 products, ranging from pots and pans to golf balls. “Make money,” he exhorted employees, “but have fun doing it!”36
His grateful father-in-law gave him shares in the company, put him on its board, and in 1939 appointed him general manager. Dart was already flying out to Los Angeles to woo Jane Bryan by then, and that April he divorced Ruth Walgreen, with whom he had had two sons. On Christmas Day, Charles Walgreen died suddenly at age sixty-six, and control of the company passed to Ruth and her brother, Charles Walgreen Jr. It took them almost two years to force Dart out, but in 1941 they fired him. According to Dart, Walgreen senior had been closer to him than to his own children, and left him with “quite a little nest egg.”37 Dart also claimed to have cornered the bourbon market before the repeal of Prohibition and made $1
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House million in a few months by selling it as prescription whiskey for medicinal purposes. “It was borderline, but it was legal,” he explained.38 Dart himself was a teetotaler, and discouraged drinking among his subordinates.39
In November 1941, Jane and Justin Dart left Chicago for Boston, where he took charge of the Liggett Drug Company, a subsidiary of United Drug, Inc., a sprawling, inefficient conglomerate, which also licensed the Rexall name to more than twelve thousand independent druggists in the U.S., Canada, England, and Ireland. In April 1943, he was made president of the parent company, which he renamed United-Rexall. In 1945 he persuaded the board to move the headquarters to Los Angeles—“I thought it was the promised land”—and started construction on a $2 million headquarters at the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards with “the world’s largest drugstore” on its ground floor.40
The Darts built a house, which they named Winds Aloft, at 944 Airole Way in Bel Air, not far from Dick Powell and June Allyson’s new mansion.
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