Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [190]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Mary Jane and Charles Wick, a show business lawyer who started a nationwide chain of nursing homes in 1956, would eventually become an integral part of the Reagan Group. In those days, however, the Wicks were not very social, and their friendship with the Reagans revolved around the school and the children. Charlie Wick, an inveterate joke-teller and all-occasion piano player, would eventually double as the Group’s court jester. When I asked him where he and Mary Jane were from, he immediately shot back, “She was from Minneapolis and I was from Cleveland, before it closed.” They met in Los Angeles in 1944. “Tommy Dorsey had sent me out here to buy the Casino Gardens in Ocean Park, where all the big bands played, and I was staying at Rudy Vallee’s house,” Wick recalled. “One Saturday I was coming down to the pool and there was this gorgeous creature sitting by the tennis court watching them play.”73 It was a case of opposites attracting: the short, dark, nominally Jewish Wick and the tall, fair, staunchly Protestant Mary Jane Woods were married in 1947 and had five children, one right after another. Their eldest son, Charles junior, whom everyone called C.Z., was in Patti’s class at John Thomas Dye, and their daughter Cindy was in Ron’s.
“A lot of mothers didn’t pick up their own children from school,” Mary Jane Wick told me. “They had nannies, and they picked them up. Nancy always picked up her children. I always picked up my children. And I think we became friends because we would always get there early. She would get in my car or I would get in her car—Nancy drove a red station wagon.
Nancy and Ronnie were both very involved with the school. They both worked in the hot-dog booth at the annual school fair in June, and they both came out with ketchup and mustard all over them when it was over.”74
Betty Adams recalled teasing Nancy about her station wagon. “I’d say,
‘Aren’t you ever going to sell that old Ford?’ She said, ‘You’ll be surprised when you see what I’m doing.’ So I said to Mary Jane, ‘Oh, she’s getting a new Ford station wagon.’ The next day she brought it to school, and she’d just had it repainted. That’s the way Nancy was. She saved everything.”
Adams added, “One year after I married Bob Adams, he had a heart attack, and they put him in bed from December to June. Nancy never forgot me. I couldn’t do anything for her, because my whole attention was to my husband, but she’d come by in the afternoon just to say hi.”75
Patti was such a good student that, like her father, she skipped third grade.
“She was smart, and musically talented, and one of the prettiest girls in our class,” recalled C. Z. Wick.76 According to Lanetta Wahlgren, she was also The Group: 1958–1962
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something of a tomboy. “Patti and I used to go down to Bristol Circle on Sunset with a bunch of our gang. It was all dirt in those days, and we would make these little mounds and jump off them on our bikes. Brentwood and Pacific Palisades were almost like the country then, and we were all really farm kids in a way, living in a very sophisticated environment.”77
When Patti was about nine, Betty Adams recalled, “Nancy wanted her to go to dancing school at Miss Ryan’s, which was near Hancock Park on Wilshire across from Perrino’s.” (Perrino’s restaurant was to L.A. society what Chasen’s was to Hollywood.) “My daughter, Fonza, was in the same grade as Patti, and we made sure they went places together, whether they wanted to or not. Ronnie and Nancy and I would drive our girls to the dancing school about five o’clock. Then we’d go to Perrino’s, eat our dinner, pick up the little darlings, and go home. . . . We did have fun together with the kids. We sent them to Douglas Camp up in Carmel Valley, and Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale sent their child. Nancy and I took Fonza and Patti to the train ourselves. We put them on the train and cried all the way home. Nancy was a good mother. You never read about that.”78
Betsy Bloomingdale recalled driving the children to camp with the Reagans