Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [164]
Eight weeks after they were married, the Reagans announced that Nancy was expecting a baby at Christmastime. In June, reporters in Missouri noticed, her condition was already showing. On the evening of October 20, Ronnie and Nancy were at a horse show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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Hollywood, watching one of their horses—a mare named Mrs. Simpson after the Duchess of Windsor—jump. During the show Nancy started having labor pains, but she insisted it was just the baby changing positions or cramps. Ronnie wanted to take her to the hospital, but she made him take her home, an hour’s drive along Sunset Boulevard. By the time they got into bed, the contractions were coming fast.
“There was a heat wave,” Nancy Reagan told me. “It was so hot I thought I was going to lose the baby.”21 After fourteen hours of labor at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, her doctor asked Ronnie for permission to perform a cesarean. Patricia Ann Reagan was born at 2:30 in the afternoon on October 21, seven and a half months after the wedding. Although she weighed a healthy seven pounds three ounces, Patti was always told by her parents that she had spent two months in an incubator. “This was the Fifties,” she wrote in her autobiography, The Way I See It. “Good girls weren’t supposed to have sex before marriage. If they did, they were supposed to be ashamed of it and hide it. So, if you had a baby seven months after you got married, pretending prematurity was one option.”22
“Nancy was pregnant when they were married,” a longtime family friend told me. “It was common knowledge.” Still, the question remains whether Nancy knew she was pregnant or had told Ronnie that she was before he called Loyal Davis and asked for her hand on February 20—
about a month after the child was presumably conceived. “Go ahead and count” is all Nancy Reagan would ever say.23
“If you drive up to the house on Amalfi,” Nancy Reagan told me over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air many years later, “you’ll see there’s an olive tree out front that Ronnie had planted for me when I had Patti. When I came home from the hospital it was there with a big red ribbon around it that said, ‘Welcome Home, Mommy.’ Most people don’t know this about Ronnie, but he was a very, very sentimental, romantic man.”24
From then on, Ronnie would call his wife Mommy, in letters and in person, in private and among friends. In his autobiography he practically admitted that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having to share his new wife with a baby so soon into their marriage. “I confess that at the moment her arrival didn’t impress me much,” he wrote about Patti’s birth. “The only word I wanted concerned her mother.”25
On doctor’s orders, Nancy stayed in bed for six weeks after Patti’s birth, and an English nanny named Penny was hired to look after the baby. The 2 6 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House chubby little girl with a full head of dark hair was a problem child from the beginning. “Patti always, always wanted attention twenty-four hours a day from the day she was born,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And you couldn’t give anyone attention twenty-four hours a day.”26
Nancy wore her wedding hat—minus the veil—to Patti’s christening at the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church in December. Bill Holden was the godfather, and Louise Tracy stood in for the godmother, Colleen Moore Hargrave, who was unable to leave Chicago. Edith and Loyal were there, as was Nelle, looking frail but proud in a black dress and light-colored shawl.
One week after Patti’s birth, Jane Wyman made headlines