Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [176]
One of the things Ronnie liked most about his G.E. job was that it gave him plenty of time at the ranch when he wasn’t on the road. “I had television worked down to an average of about one day a week,” he later said, “and I could spend four or five days a week at the ranch. My routine was just get up—the ranch was only a thirty-five-minute drive from our home—go out there for the day, back in the evening. I loved every minute of that.”98
In the summer of 1957, Nancy became pregnant for the third time since Patti’s birth. She had suffered two miscarriages in four years but was determined to have a boy. As Reagan later wrote, “Nancy had decided Patti should have a brother. Personally I would have settled for the three of us: I grew frightened every time I remembered that long night when Patti was born, and didn’t want to take chances with a happiness already so great I couldn’t believe it. At the same time I knew Patti would have that brother, because I couldn’t say no to Nancy.”99
Nancy was ordered to stay in bed for the last three months of her preg-2 8 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House nancy. Frances Bergen and June Allyson gave her a small baby shower. Arlene Dahl, who was one of the guests, recalled, “I had just had my son, Lorenzo, and friends of mine had given me a blue candle that Nancy wanted in the worst way. She was hoping and praying that her second child would be a boy, and I gave her what was left of my blue candle, which had produced Lorenzo.”100
Ronnie arrived home from a G.E. tour the day before Nancy went into the hospital for a planned cesarean. “Moral support for Papa,” he recalled, was provided by Ursula Taylor and Edith, who had flown in from Chicago.
At 8:04 a.m. on May 20, 1958, the eight-and-a-half-pound Ronald Prescott Reagan arrived.101 Reagan again admitted that his primary emotion was relief that his wife had survived. For Nancy, a dream had come true, and people soon sensed that the little boy was her favorite.
That’s certainly what five-and-half-year-old Patti felt. “As much as I wanted to participate in this new adventure of having a baby in the house,”
she recalled, “I was usually ushered out of my brother’s room. I didn’t know it then, but Ron’s and my relationship was being defined at that point. There were nights when I snuck into his room and stared at him sleeping, smelled his baby smells, listened to his breathing. I had to be very quiet because there were intercoms in both his room and mine. I knew I was taking a risk, but it was worth it. I used to ask my mother if I could hold Ron, but the answer was always the same. ‘No. You might drop him.’”102
The Reagans asked the Taylors to be Ron’s godparents, and in 1959 they became the godparents of Bob and Ursula’s daughter, Tessa. In March of that year, Ronnie and Nancy celebrated their seventh anniversary, and when his G.E. contract came up for renewal not long after that, he was given 25
percent ownership of the show, making him a partner of MCA/Revue. The new contract also reduced his time on the road to ten weeks a year.103
“He was always glad to come home,” a close family friend told me.
“He knew Nancy would be there waiting for him with open arms. To be treasured like that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I’ve never seen a marriage like that. He was nuts about her. He’d come into a room and look at her like she was the flower of the Nile.”
C H A P T E R T W E LV E
THE GROUP
1958–1962
My mother always said, “You’re known by the company you keep.” And it’s true.
Nancy Reagan to author, February 7, 1999
Nancy cherry-picked her friends.
A close friend of the Reagans’ to author
Motion-picture people engage in civic, cultural and charitable activities, and individually appear occasionally in the doings of “downtown” society.
But it is axiomatic that any function where movie people turn out in force automatically is not “society.”
Gladwin Hill, “California Society Stems from Gold Rush,”
The New York Times, February 18, 1957
DURING THE FIRST