Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [157]
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ion” against Communism in Hollywood.147 Hayden went right back to work at Fox, and was rewarded with an official statement from the SAG
board congratulating him on “his honesty and frankness.”148
Along with the other industry potentates in MPIC, Reagan had come to believe that confessing one’s own sins was not enough; one also had to do penance by exposing the sins of others before one could be redeemed.
He and IATSE head Roy Brewer proposed the creation of a Patriotic Services Committee at MPIC, and spent much time and effort clearing the falsely accused, rehabilitating cooperative penitents, and screening prospective employees for the studios.149
“Any American who has been a member of the Communist party at any time, but who has now changed his mind and is loyal to our country should be willing to stand up and be counted, admit ‘I was wrong’ and give all the information he has to the government agencies who are combating the Red plotters,” Reagan wrote in the Hollywood Citizen News in July 1951. “We’ve gotten rid of the Communist conspirators in Hollywood. Let’s do it now in other industries.”150
“Ronnie Reagan . . . is a happy man these days,” Hedda Hopper reported that summer. “He has a new 350-acre ranch that he loves and it’s very obvious that he’s in love with Nancy Davis.”151 For months, the Hollywood press had been describing Ronnie and Nancy as an “everynightem,” predicting an imminent marriage, or even an elopement. Ronnie refused to take calls from reporters; Nancy would say only, “He hasn’t asked me yet.”152 That spring, she had stopped seeing Robert Walker; in August—a few days after completing My Son John, in which he played a Communist who is turned in by his mother—Walker died from a sedative injection administered by a psychiatrist.153
Ronnie and Nancy were occasionally photographed at premieres and nightclubs, and frequently dined at their favorite restaurant, Chasen’s, “especially on Tuesday nights, when the special was Beef Belmont,” as she remembered it. But they spent many more evenings at her apartment watching TV, or having quiet dinners at Bill and Ardis Holden’s “charming Tudor house”
in Toluca Lake.154 Almost every Saturday, Ronnie invited Nancy to accompany him and the children to his new ranch in Malibu Canyon.
“As far as we all knew at the time, she was the first woman in his life since Mother,” Maureen Reagan wrote in her memoir, First Father, First Daughter. “You could tell the two of them were crazy about each other. They 2 5 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House weren’t lovey-dovey or anything like that, at least not in front of us kids, but they had a natural, easy way of being with each other that suggested that they belonged together.”155 The ten-year-old Maureen took to her future stepmother immediately: “I especially liked Nancy because when the four of us were at the ranch, she would happily perform one of my most hated chores—whitewashing the thousands of feet of redwood fence that Dad was building. . . . He’d spend hours in the hot sun building paddocks for the horses, a riding ring, or whatever, all with a manual posthole digger.”156
Michael, who was six, liked the way Nancy would let him sit on her lap and massage his back on their rides out to the ranch. “She was always cheerful, unlike Mom who had constant mood shifts,” he wrote in his memoir, On the Outside Looking In. An unhappy child who cried himself to sleep most nights, Michael craved attention and stability. The previous year, he had joined Maureen at the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes; Jane and Ronnie took turns having them on weekends. While Michael blamed his mother for the divorce—and took pleasure in annoying her with stories about his good times at the ranch—he idolized his father. “Dad taught Maureen and me to ride by leading us around the corral. He was a pussycat as a teacher, always calm and patient,” Michael