Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [200]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the death your right to agree with them. The classic liberal used to be the man who believed the individual was, and should be forever, the master of his destiny. That is now the conservative position.”36
The book’s last line, however, goes to Nancy—“the rest of me.”
In late 1963, Lew Wasserman came through with a role in the film The Killers. Co-produced by Revue Productions and Universal Pictures, it was one of the first made-for-TV movies—a form for which Wasserman can be credited—but was ultimately shown in theaters after NBC decided it was too violent for home viewing. Reagan played a sinister underworld figure with a semipermanent scowl and got fourth billing, after Lee Mar-vin, Angie Dickinson, and John Cassavetes. Dickinson, who played Reagan’s kept woman, remembered that their big scene came when she told Reagan she was going home with the Cassavetes character. “Reagan slaps me and says, ‘I said, get home.’ He hated doing that. He’s just dreadful in that movie, because he could not be a bad man. He could not be bad. He was the most pleasant man I’ve ever dealt with. Every time I would see him for the next twenty years, it would be ‘I’m still glad I didn’t really have to hit you.’ ”37
The Killers, Reagan’s last film, turned out to be a critical and commercial flop. “It’s one I try to forget,” Reagan told the Saturday Evening Post in 1974. “I let Lew Wasserman . . . talk me into doing [it].” Nancy inter-jected, “No—it was a personal favor.”38 Over lunch with me thirty years later, Nancy Reagan elaborated: “Lew said if Ronnie did this movie, he would get him other movies after that. But when Ronnie tried to hold him to his end of the deal—well, there weren’t any movies. He never really forgave Lew.”39 Several of their friends told me that the Reagans and the Wassermans were on distant terms all through the 1960s and 1970s.
The Killers started filming the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “It was a very, very tough time,” said Dickinson, who at thirty-two was one of the most attractive actresses in town and rumored to have been one of JFK’s girlfriends. Perhaps in deference to her, Reagan refrained from talking politics on the set. “You weren’t about to talk politics when this man had just been murdered—and most of us were Democrats,” she said. “But Ronnie was always studying on the set. He was knee-deep in all this political stuff.”40
Nancy later wrote that she was driving down San Vicente Boulevard when the news from Dallas “came over the car radio,” but neither she nor The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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her husband make any further note in their books of an event that was as traumatic as Pearl Harbor.41 Patti, who much to her parents’ annoyance had a crush on the young president, claimed that her mother registered no emotion when she picked her up from school that afternoon, and that her father’s only reaction as they watched the television coverage was to remark, when Jacqueline Kennedy stepped off the plane from Dallas, “Couldn’t she have changed her suit? There’s blood all over it.” Patti said she begged her parents not to go ahead with a cocktail party planned for two nights later, but Nancy told her, “Stop being so dramatic.”42 The Reagans had the party, and the Bloomingdales, Bob and Ursula Taylor, Holmes and Virginia Tuttle, and John Wayne attended it.43
On January 3, 1964, Barry Goldwater, wearing a work shirt and blue jeans at his home in Phoenix, announced that he would seek the Republican