Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [212]
To bolster Reagan’s new, middle-of-the-road image, Tuttle took him out to Eldorado for a round of golf with Eisenhower. Although Ike remained neutral in the Reagan-Christopher contest, he is said to have told Tuttle, “I like your boy.”112 In the meantime, Salvatori was quietly encouraging his friend Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty to challenge Governor Brown in the Democratic primary. For his part, Cy Rubel set up a lunch at the California Club at which Reagan was given the blessing of Asa Call and the Committee of 25—some say it was Call who really decided to run Reagan in the first place. Rubel also provided the Friends of Reagan with office space in the Union Oil Building and persuaded former USC football star and fellow oil executive Joe Shell not to enter the race. The triumvirate also prevailed on Republican state chairman Dr. Gaylord Parkinson to issue his so-called Eleventh Commandment that spring: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” This enabled Reagan, who as someone who had never held public office was more vulnerable to criticism than his opponent, to take the high road. Christopher, who was reprimanded at least twice by Parkinson for violating his stricture, seethed, and his supporters accused Reagan’s rich backers of buying the state chairman off.113
By September, polls were showing Reagan as the clear front-runner, but Christopher as more likely to beat Brown. So much mail was pouring in—
hundreds of letters a day, according to Kathy Randall Davis, the Spencer-Roberts secretary assigned to Reagan—that she had to hide some of it from the still undeclared candidate in order to prevent him from trying to answer The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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every letter himself, as was his custom. “He and Mrs. Reagan had this thing about mail,” she later wrote, “they almost fought over who would get to open it.”114
It was a thrilling time for Ronnie and Nancy. She started wearing a
“Reagan for Governor” button even on her evening clothes, and had the housekeeper, Anne Allman, the gardener, her hairdresser, and the butcher at the Brentwood Country Market wearing them, too. Seven-year-old Ron plastered his bedroom walls with Reagan bumper stickers. Only Patti was unenthusiastic about the turn her father’s career had taken, which left her overwhelmed with the feeling that she had little control over her own life. At Christmas that year, Patti was so sulky that Loyal pulled her aside and said, “I want you to show how proud you are of your father. You back him up, do you understand me?”115
Patti felt that her father had become more remote than ever since his big speech for Goldwater. “Often, I’d come into a room and he’d look up from his note cards as though he wasn’t sure who I was.” Her relationship with her mother had not improved either as she entered her teen years. There were scenes at I. Magnin and Saks over clothes, and shouting matches at home. Patti said her mother listened in on her phone calls with boys and tore up her emotionally dark, typically teenage poetry. She saw her relationship with her mother as a constant battle. When her father came home from a campaign trip or a day of work on Death Valley Days, he always dismissed her accusations against her mother. “Patti . . . what is it with you?
Your mother does everything she can for you and all you do is talk back to her and hurt her. . . . All she wants is to have a daughter. She looks at friends of hers, like Mrs. Bloomingdale, and how nice a time she has with Lisa, and she doesn’t understand why she can’t have that with you.”116
“All our classmates knew that Patti didn’t like her mother,” said Liza Lerner, a daughter of the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who was a friend of Patti’s at John Thomas Dye. “When we started sixth grade, Patti was the most developed girl in the class, and she was insecure and self-conscious about it.
You have to realize that all thirteen-year-olds complain about their mothers, but Patti particularly had a thing about hers. I would go over