Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [171]
Switzer pointed out. Along with a massive stone fireplace, the Reagans’
bedroom had the largest control panel of all: “Flick this switch,” Switzer said, “and every light in the house goes on one by one.”64
Ronnie and Nancy would live on San Onofre Drive for the next twenty-five years.
In both Pacific Palisades houses, Nancy Reagan told me, “Ronnie drew a heart in wet cement and then wrote our initials and put an arrow through the heart. At the house on Amalfi he did it on the patio, and at the house on San Onofre he did it in front of the barbecue.”65 The new house was finished in December 1955, and Nancy softened its contemporary architecture somewhat by furnishing it with traditional sofas and club chairs in the living room and den and a black-lacquer dining room set that seemed to cross 2 7 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Chippendale with Art Deco. Ronnie’s reproduction George Washington desk went into the master bedroom, as did a Paul Clemens oil portrait of Nancy hugging Patti in a white-and-gold frame. The Reagans’ first houseguests were Loyal and Edith, who from then on would come to stay every Christmas. There was also a new addition to the family that holiday season: a collie named Lucky, “because that’s the way I felt,” said Ronnie.66
The Reagans’ social life was far from glittering in the early years of their marriage. In memoirs and coffee-table books of the period, they turn up at major events such as the 1954 wedding of Jack Benny’s daughter, Joan, which had a guest list of 1,200, but they are nowhere to be found at the A-list dinner parties of the Goetzes, the Goldwyns, and the Selznicks, or the even more exclusive get-togethers at the Ronald Col-mans’, the Gary Coopers’, and the Jimmy Stewarts’. “As a couple during the fifties they had no social prestige,” said Richard Gully. “They were not Gable and Lombard, or Tyrone Power and Linda Christian. They were not glamorous. They weren’t in the top circles socially. No one ever saw them. They were never at Jack and Ann Warner’s. Ann Warner thought Reagan was dull and had nothing in common with either one of them.”67
“We really weren’t part of that Hollywood scene,” Nancy Reagan admitted. “I mean, we’d stay home at night and pop popcorn. . . . When we did go out, we mainly saw the Holdens, Dick Powell and June Allyson, and Bob and Ursula Taylor, who lived across the street from us on San Onofre.”68 After a string of brilliant hits, including Sunset Boulevard, Sta-lag 17, Sabrina, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and Picnic, Bill Holden was the highest-paid actor in the business and the number one box office draw, but he hated fancy parties, preferring to share his extensive collection of fine wines with close friends.69 The other two couples were equally rich and famous, but, like the Holdens, the Taylors shunned the social scene, and the Powells were considered a bit B-list. According to Arlene Dahl, who married Fernando Lamas and moved to Pacific Palisades in 1954, the Reagans were still regularly attending Carroll Righter’s sign-of-the-month parties. “Nancy had become pretty good at designing her own charts,” Dahl added.70
The Taylors had also moved to the Palisades in 1954, shortly after they were married. Robert Taylor, “the man with the perfect face,” was one of the all-time great matinee idols, best remembered for holding a dying Garbo in his arms in Camille. He had been on the SAG board in the Pacific Palisades: 1952–1958
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1940s, and he and his first wife, Barbara Stanwyck, had become friendly with Ronnie and Jane. He was divorced from Stanwyck in 1951, and, like Reagan, he apparently found happiness and stability in his second marriage. His movie career was also waning, though not so rapidly as Reagan’s; he hung on at MGM until 1959, when he signed up for his own TV series, called The Detectives. The two men, who were the same age, shared an enthusiasm for horsebreeding and