Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [163]
“From the start, our marriage was like an adolescent’s dream of what a marriage should be,” Reagan would later write. “It was rich and full from the beginning, and it has gotten more so with each passing day. Nancy moved into my heart and replaced an emptiness that I’d been trying to ignore for a long time.”13
On March 13, while the new Mr. and Mrs. Reagan were still on their honeymoon, Louella Parsons announced Jane Wyman’s engagement to Travis Kleefeld, the twenty-six-year-old scion of a locally prominent contracting family. The photographers went wild when both couples attended the Academy Awards later that month. Jane was up for best actress for The Blue Veil but lost to Vivien Leigh. A few days later she broke off the engagement with Kleefeld. Since Jane was at the height of her career—and an older woman going out with a younger man, which raised eyebrows in those days—the Hollywood press played the story for all it was worth. An irked Nancy told friends she was sure Jane had set up the whole thing to upstage Ronnie’s marriage.14 As Richard Gully, a Carroll Righter follower, remarked many years later, “Destiny planned to pit Jane Wyman against Nancy Reagan.
Jane is a Capricorn and Nancy is a Cancer and it’s a very bad mix. They were bound to clash. It was fate.”15
Ronnie moved into Nancy’s Hilgaard Avenue duplex but kept his place on Londonderry Terrace, because there wasn’t enough room in her apartment for all of their clothes. Soon they found a three-bedroom Cape Cod–style house at 1258 North Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades. “We bought it for $42,000,” Nancy Reagan recalled. “I loved that house. Pacific Palisades wasn’t as built up as it is today. We had a wonderful garden—it was almost like living in the country.”16
Before the war, Pacific Palisades had been considered too far west for the Hollywood crowd, though its steep hillsides covered with oaks, cedars, palms, and eucalyptus attracted artists and writers, most notably the Nobel 2 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann, who settled there in 1940 after fleeing Nazi Germany. By 1952, however, with prices escalating in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, the Palisades was rapidly becoming an upper-middle-class suburb. Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, and Lawrence Welk were among the first entertainers to move there. “Jerry Lewis lived on our street,” Nancy Reagan told me.17 The summer the Reagans moved in, Mann, hounded by HUAC for openly supporting the Hollywood 10, sold his estate and returned to Europe. “The sick, tense atmosphere of this country oppresses me,” he said. “I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil.”18
For Reagan, such a thought would have been inconceivable. “This land of ours is the last best hope of man on earth,” he declared in a commencement address at William Woods College in June 1952, echoing Lincoln.
Ronnie and Nancy had traveled by train to the Disciples of Christ school in Fulton, Missouri, and Reagan wrote his speech on the way. America, he told the graduating students, was “a promised land . . . in the divine scheme of things . . . less of a place than an idea . . . an idea that has been deep in the souls of man ever since man started his long trail from the swamps. It is nothing but the inherent love of freedom in each one of us, and the great ideological struggle that we find ourselves engaged in today is not a new struggle. It’s the same old battle.”19
The Reagans also attended the premiere of his last Warners film, The Winning Team, in Springfield, Missouri, where their train was greeted by some seven hundred fans, even though it arrived at midnight. President Truman was in Springfield for a reunion of his World War I artillery unit, but at the last minute he decided not to attend the film’s opening.