Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [213]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy seemed like someone with blind ambition, who just had a mission, and anything that got in her way . . . When you’re a kid, you get a visceral sense of things. She wasn’t a warm person. She was a cold person. I knew the Wicks slightly better. Mary Jane Wick was an outgoing, sweet woman, and Mr. Wick was a nice guy. Their house was a more normal, inviting place to be than the Reagans’.”117
“I don’t know what it was with Patti and me,” Nancy Reagan confided years later. “Maybe the way I looked, the way I dressed—I don’t know.
When she was in seventh grade at John Thomas Dye, the principal said, ‘I think Patti should go to this doctor.’ So we went to this psychiatrist, a crippled woman, I remember. ‘I think you’d better get Patti away from you for a year, because she has a real fixation about her mother.’ That’s what she told Ronnie and me.”118
Nancy had hoped that Patti would go to Marlborough or Westlake, the two most social private girls schools in Los Angeles, but they wouldn’t take her because she failed eighth grade at John Thomas Dye. Patti wanted to go to a public school, because they were coed and integrated, but Nancy would not hear of it. After Patti deliberately botched the entrance exam at the exclusive Bishop School in La Jolla because it was all-girls and required uniforms, Betsy Bloomingdale suggested the Santa Catalina School near Santa Barbara, which was run by nuns but attended by girls from some of San Francisco’s WASPiest old families. But the nuns rejected Patti, too. In September 1965 she entered the coed Orme School, located in the desert outside Flagstaff, Arizona, which was also a functioning cattle ranch. She promptly grew her hair long, had her ears pierced, tightened her jeans and shortened her skirts, and took to wearing thick black eye-liner and white lipstick. “When you’ve been dressed like Little Bo Peep for years,” she later explained, “the slut look is very desirable.”119
According to Patti, just before she left for boarding school, she had overheard Nancy telling Stu Spencer that Reagan’s campaign literature should say that Ronnie had two children and that no mention should be made of Reagan’s first marriage. Spencer, who felt that Rockefeller’s divorce had cost him the nomination, agreed with Nancy. This was particularly hurtful to Maureen, who had been remarried, to a Marine lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Pendelton, and who liked nothing more than talking politics with her father over dinner. An enthusiastic conservative herself, she had been a full-time volunteer for Goldwater and had been encouraging her father to run for office since he switched parties. Michael, The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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on the other hand, had again been cast out by the family. After graduating from Judson with honors and being rewarded with a new Ford Galaxie 500 by his father, he made it through only one year at Arizona State, and was working the night shift loading freight for a trucking company at the Port of Los Angeles.120
“The consultants were very nervous about Dad’s previous marriage, and the very clear message I was getting was that Michael and I were not to be involved in any way in the campaign,” Maureen wrote. “In fact, Stu Spencer later suggested to my husband that I dig a hole and pull the dirt in over me until after the election.” When she called her father to discuss the situation, he told her, “If you pay someone to manage a campaign . . .
then you’ve got to give them the authority to do it as they see fit.”121 He agreed to let her introduce him at an event put on by the San Diego Federation of Republican Women, and he let it pass when Maureen,