Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [159]
According to Ed Helin, a longtime associate of Righter’s, Reagan started consulting the “guru to the stars” when he was still married to Wyman, who was also a client. “They even picked the date astrologically to get a good clean divorce without any problems,” Helin disclosed. “Whenever an occupation is kind of iffy, like show business, real estate, politics, the stock market,” he added, “you’re going to get a lot of people going to either psychics or astrologers.”168
Righter’s movie star clients depended on him to set the dates for signing contracts, starting films, taking trips, even conceiving children. “I don’t ask Carroll when I should go to the bathroom,” Van Johnson’s wife, Evie, told Time magazine, “[but] some of our friends do.”169 Among those for whom Righter did monthly, weekly, or daily charts were Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Dick Powell, Bob Cummings, Lana Turner, Adolphe Menjou, Ann Sothern, Susan Hayward, Rhonda Fleming, and Peter Lawford, as well as the writer Erich Maria Remarque and Goodwin Knight, who would become governor of California in 1953. Buff Chandler, the wife of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, sat on the board of the Carrroll Righter Foundation, which ran an astrology institute at his Hollywood mansion.170
With his patrician air and gold-buttoned blazers, Righter reeked respectability. A confirmed bachelor from a Main Line family, he had obtained a law degree and chaired the Philadelphia Opera before moving to Los Angeles in 1939. As a practicing Episcopalian, he assured his clients that astrology did not conflict with traditional religion. “If God works through other mediums,” he told Life in 1954, “why not also through the planets?”171
He virtually invented the syndicated daily horoscope column, and by the 1960s, when astrology had became gospel for the hippie generation, his prognostications could be read in more than three hundred newspapers.
The actor Cesar Romero took Nancy to her first Righter party, in Jan-Ronnie and Nancy in Hollywood: 1949–1952
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uary 1950, a month or so after her first date with Ronnie.172 About the same time, Nancy befriended Arlene Dahl, who had moved from Warners to Metro in 1948 and was something of a fanatic about astrology. The earliest reference to Nancy’s interest in the zodiac can be found in a Walter Huston biography and dates back to 1933, when she was twelve. In describing a dinner party hosted by Nan and Walter and attended by Edith and Loyal, author John Weld notes, “The conversation turned to astrology. Edith Davis’s daughter Nancy had recently had her horoscope charted by Nan’s friend Deborah Lewis, a professional astrologer and writer for American Astrology. She prophesied that Nancy would be a great success, no matter what she chose to do.”173
That’s not the way it looked as 1951 drew to a close. Nancy’s film career was all but over, and the man of her dreams still had not proposed. In September she was told that MGM would terminate her contract when her next option came up, in March.174 It was clear by then that while her talent was substantial, her star appeal was limited. Earlier in the year she had made her last two films for Metro, turning in her usual solid but un-charismatic performances as James Whitmore’s wife (again) in Shadow in the Sky, and George Murphy’s wife in Talk About a Stranger. “After reading the script of that frightful picture,” Murphy later said, “Nancy and I both realized the studio wanted to get rid of us.”175
Nancy decided not to go home for the holidays that year, preferring to stay close to Ronnie. “Ronnie brought over a small tree for my apartment,” she recalled, “and on