Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [162]
At some point they called Edith and Loyal in Chicago, Nelle at home in West Hollywood, and the children at Chadwick to say, “OK, it’s official,” as Maureen later put it, adding, “I think Michael and I both felt a little weird
. . . waiting for a phone call like that, but Dad felt strongly that we should be a part of things in at least this small way.”6
The happy twosome then drove off in Ronnie’s Cadillac convertible to the Mission Inn in Riverside, the Spanish colonial-style hotel that was famous locally for hosting presidents going back to William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. Richard and Pat Nixon had been married and spent their wedding night there in 1940. A plaque in the lobby commemorates the Reagans’ first night as man and wife:
Upon arrival, a bouquet of red roses greeted the couple, compliments of the hotel with wishes for a long and successful union. Before continuing on to Phoenix the following morning, the Reagans gave the roses to another guest of the Inn—an elderly woman staying across the hall from the newlyweds.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
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After a long day on dusty Route 10, Ronnie and Nancy checked into the Arizona Biltmore. Loyal and Edith arrived in Phoenix four days later.
Ronnie later wrote, “Meeting her father, the doctor, wasn’t the easiest moment I ever had. After all, here was a man internationally renowned in the world of surgery, a fearless stickler for principle, and a man who could no more choose the easy path of expediency than he could rob the poor box.
My fear lasted about a minute and a half after we met—which was as long as it took to find out he was a true humanitarian.”7
Ronnie related to his new mother-in-law on a less elevated plane. They quickly discovered a shared fondness for off-color humor and, according to Richard Davis, whenever they got together from then on “the first thing Edith would do was take Ronnie into the guest bedroom and lock the door. They would tell dirty jokes and stories for hours. . . . You could hear the hilarious laughter. . . . She just adored him.”8
The Davises weren’t staying at the hotel, as they had recently built a house in the adjacent Biltmore Estates, which was considered Phoenix’s best address. The white-brick ranch-style house with its gray slate roof and dark green shutters was tastefully landscaped and set along the edge of the Biltmore’s golf course. Still, it was among the more modest residences in this posh enclave, where the Davises’ neighbors included Senator Barry Goldwater, Vincent and Brooke Astor, and Henry and Clare Booth Luce.
A couple who were also honeymooning at the Biltmore that spring remember the Davises showing up every afternoon to join Ronnie and Nancy at their poolside cabana.9 It was clear that Ronnie was impressed with his new in-laws, and not without reason. Two years earlier Loyal, then in his mid-fifties, had been elected to the board of regents of the American College of Surgeons and by the end of the decade would become chairman—“the most powerful position in American surgery,” as the Chicago Daily News proclaimed upon his appointment.10
Edith, at sixty-four (pretending to be fifty-six), continued to amaze in her own way. A few months before her daughter’s wedding, while Loyal was giving a lecture at Oxford University, Edith and her Chicago socialite pal Narcissa Thorne were having tea with the Queen Mother in London.
(Thorne presented the dowager queen with a rare first edition of James Doyle’s History of England; Edith confided to a Chicago society columnist that Her Majesty was “very folksy.”)11 The Davises’ two-month European Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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tour had also included a visit with General Eisenhower, then commander of NATO, and his wife, Mamie, at their home outside Paris. Probably as a result, Ronnie and Nancy received a congratulatory telegram from the Eisenhowers two weeks after their wedding.12
Ronnie