Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [192]
“The first thing Nancy did when I moved in was send me to the dentist,” Michael writes in his memoir, On the Outside Looking In. “I had not been to the dentist in years. . . . [He] discovered I had almost a dozen cav-ities. Nancy was livid with Mom because my teeth had been let go for so long. She also took me shopping for new clothes, something Mom rarely had time for.” But, he adds, “like everyone else in the house, including Dad, I was a little intimidated by Nancy.”89 On Sunday mornings, when the family went to services at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church, Michael was left home, because he was a Catholic.90 According to Patti, her parents avoided any mention of Jane Wyman, and she was never made to feel that Michael was her true brother.91
Both Patti and Michael looked forward to Saturdays at the Malibu Hills ranch, when Ronnie took them riding, and Nancy often stayed home. “I planned all week what I wanted to say to him,” Patti later wrote. “I thought if I found the right words, shared enough thoughts with him, he would reach across the distance.”92 “I didn’t dare talk with Dad about my feelings,”
recalled Michael, “because he always seemed to be uncomfortable whenever he and I embarked on anything resembling a personal discussion.”93
“Ronnie certainly wasn’t given to sitting down and psychoanalyzing himself with the children,” Nancy Reagan admitted. “How many fathers did in those days?” But he made an effort, she pointed out: “There was an empty lot at the top of our street, and Ronnie would take the children and their friends up there on windy days to fly kites.”94 In 1961, when Maureen, who had dropped out of Marymount and was working as a typist in Washington, announced that she was marrying a policeman, Ronnie and Nancy attended the wedding. Jane, who remarried Fred Karger that year, did not.
Jane’s fifth and final marriage would last four years; Maureen’s first—to a wife beater, as it turned out—less than one.95
Michael’s grades were still perilously low, and he was suspended from Loyola several times for unruly behavior. He recalled that Nancy was furious 3 1 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House when she saw his report card. “You’re not living up to the Reagan name or image,” she told him, “and unless you start shaping up, it would be best for you to change your name and leave the house.” He snapped back, “Why don’t you just tell me the name I was born with, so at least when I walk out the door I’ll know what name to use.”
According to Michael, Nancy took up his challenge and managed to get ahold of his adoption papers. She told him his real name was John L.
Flaugher and that his birth parents had not been married.96 “My relationship with Nancy was now strained to the point where we spoke to each other only when necessary,” he writes.97 His father blamed him for “pressuring” her into giving him the information, but tried to encourage Michael by offering to get him into Eureka College if he made it through high school. Michael had a counterproposal: “If you send me out of state to a coed high school for my last year, I promise to get good grades.”98
Loyal Davis pulled some strings, and in September 1962, Michael was enrolled at the Judson School in Arizona, where his grades improved and he became the quarterback on the football team and the star pitcher on the baseball team. When his parents couldn’t make a baseball game just before Easter the following year, Loyal and Edith filled in for them. “My first time up at bat with two men