Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [172]
Nancy’s friendship with Ursula Taylor revolved around the children.
Like Nancy, Ursula had put aside a modest movie career, in her native Germany, to focus on her family; she had two young children by her first marriage, and two more with Taylor, a boy named Terrance in 1955 and a girl named Theresa in 1959. Nancy frequently turned to her for help with Patti, who even at that young age seemed to have a hostile relationship with her mother. When she was three, she asked her father to marry her, which can be seen as merely cute or disturbingly competitive. After they moved to San Onofre and her English nanny was let go, “Patti would throw up all over her bed,” Nancy Reagan told me. “Ursula and I would go in and change that bed all the time. I remember Ursula would always say, ‘I never saw a child try so hard to get you mad.’ ”72
Nancy was not as close to Dick Powell and June Allyson, though she often took Patti to play with their children, Pam and Richard. The Powells had moved from their Tudor mansion in Bel Air to a sixty-two-acre spread in Mandeville Canyon, replete with a stone manor house, a private lake, pastures for their Black Angus cattle and sheep, a barnyard for their chickens, turkeys, and pheasants, and stables for their horses. Powell had made a successful transition from leading man to TV producer with his own company, Four Star Television, and Allyson continued making movies at MGM
all through the 1950s. They still had the same tight circle of friends—half showbiz, half big business—including the George Murphys, the Justin Darts, the Leonard Firestones, and the Edgar Bergens. And they were still square-dancing on Saturday nights. But they had their hip moments: when Ford introduced the Thunderbird in 1955, June and her girlfriends all got convertibles. Hers was pink, Punky Dart’s yellow, and Frances Bergen’s lavender.73
Of this group, Nancy gravitated toward Frances Bergen, who was by 2 7 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House far the most stylish and social. A former fashion model, she had married Edgar Bergen in 1945, when she was twenty and he was forty, and gradually transformed the rich but reclusive ventriloquist into one of Hollywood’s most esteemed and well-connected figures. The Bergens lived in Bella Vista, “a sprawling whitewashed Spanish house that hung high over Beverly Hills,” as their daughter, the actress Candice Bergen, described it in her 1984 memoir, Knock Wood, and it was at the Bergens’ parties that the Reagans occasionally mingled with the cream of 1950s Hollywood society, including Jules and Doris Stein, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Ray and Mal Milland, David Niven, Rosalind Russell, David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, and the Randolph Scotts (he was the only actor to be made a member of the Los Angeles Country Club).74
“Ronnie and Nancy lived rather quietly,” Frances Bergen recalled. “They were not that much party people. They would have small dinner parties at the G.E. house, as they called it, and we were there quite often. Usually Bob and Ursula Taylor would be there, and the Holdens, and Henry Koster, who had made his name, more or less, directing Deanna Durbin pictures, and his very pretty wife, Peggy. Bob Arthur, who was a producer at Universal, and his wife, Goldie, who was very involved in Republican causes and politics, were also very close to the Reagans then.”75
Politics was almost always on the menu at the Reagans’ dinners, even when it was just Ronnie and Nancy and Bob and Ursula in sweaters and blue jeans. Like most of the Reagans’ friends, the Taylors were staunch Republicans; he was on the board of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In contrast to Jane Wyman, who would roll her eyes and let out audible sighs of boredom when the conversation