Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [189]
not so many of us can ever find a love like that. But I still recognize that as a child you absolutely got that you were excluded from that.”67
Nancy Reagan never saw it quite that way. “Both of us were always there for the children,” she told me. “We were not the people that they try to paint us as—you know, this disinterested mother and father. That’s just a lot of malarkey.”68 Her friends tended to take her side. One of them told me, “Nancy put a lot of time into those kids. Not him much, but she did, more than a lot of those Hollywood dames. She really loved them. Patti always gave her lip and trouble, but not little Ron. Nancy worshipped at the altar of little Ron.”
Both Reagan children attended the exclusive John Thomas Dye School in Bel Air, Patti starting pre-kindergarten in 1956, Ron in 1961. John Thomas Dye is where Betty Adams sent her children, as did Dick Powell and June Allyson, Bob and Ursula Taylor, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Ray and Fran Stark, and Kirk and Anne Douglas. Judy Garland’s younger daughter, Lorna Luft, was in the same class as Patti, who remembered being thrilled when the star of The Wizard of Oz turned up at Parents’ Day one year. “It was an elite atmosphere, but it didn’t seem so to us,” Patti later wrote. “We just accepted celebrity as a part of life.”69
The school had been founded in 1929 as the Brentwood Town and The Group: 1958–1962
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Country School by John and Cathryn Dye, and renamed in 1959 in honor of their son, who had died in World War II. Although the Dyes were upright Midwestern Republicans who believed in a strict classical education—
Latin and French were compulsory—they ran their school in a distinctly casual California way. The 280 students, from nursery school to the eighth grade, began their day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and an inspirational poem called “The Salutation of the Dawn.” The girls in the lower grades wore blue-and-white gingham dresses with heart-shaped abalone buttons and blue-and-white saddle shoes; the boys wore blue shorts and white shirts without ties. Set at the top of a ridge with spectacular views of the Pacific, the campus looked like a storybook horse farm, with its white fences and two-story yellow schoolhouse topped with a weathervane. Everyone called the headmaster and headmistress, who were in their sixties, Uncle John and Auntie Cathryn.
“The day before Thanksgiving, there would be turkeys roasting on a spit in the great big fireplace in the assembly hall,” said Lanetta Wahlgren, a Hershey Chocolate heiress who was one of Patti’s friends at the school.
“Uncle John and Auntie Cathryn sat in these red high-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace, and we would sit at their feet. Every once in a while Auntie Cathryn would let us sit in the chair with her and cuddle up.”70 At Christmastime, the children were robed in white and sang carols while their parents were served hot gingerbread and wassail. “Ronnie would saw wood for the school,” Betty Adams recalled. “And he and Bob Taylor would bring over piles of it, and we had our Yuletide drink, and Ronnie’s enormous logs burned away.”
She continued, “I happened to be president of the Mothers’ Club board. Right after I met Nancy at Amelia Gray’s and realized her daughter was going to the same school as my children, I said, ‘Oh, good, you can join the Mothers’ Club board.’ Then Mary Jane Wick came along with her kids. So I said, ‘Oh, good, Mary Jane, you can be on the board, too.’ The three of us practically ran the school.”71 When the main building burned down in the 1961 Bel Air fire, the Mothers’ Club raised a large part of the money to rebuild it, and Betty Adams and Mary Jane Wick arranged for classes to be held at the Westwood Methodist Church during the reconstruction. “Betty’s father had given the land for the church years back,” explained Mary Jane Wick. “And I taught Sunday school there.”72
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