Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [225]
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legalizing abortion, and Richard Davis believes that this was one instance where the doctor’s purported influence was real.41
Reagan finally signed what was then the country’s most liberal abortion law, on June 14, 1967 (and promptly wrote a letter to Betsy Bloomingdale asking her to forgive him). A year later he told a reporter that he had done “a lot of soul-searching” and had ultimately concluded that the legal concept of self-defense meant that a “woman had a right to defend herself from her unborn child.”42 (Legal abortions in California would jump from 518 in 1967 to 199,089 in 1980, and the Governor and his wife blamed psychiatrists for making a mockery of the law by recommending an abortion for any woman who claimed she might become depressed or suicidal if she gave birth to an unwanted child.)43
These early policy decisions surprised and disappointed Reagan’s most right-wing supporters. “I really think that he is taking us for granted,” said State Senator John Schmitz, a John Birch Society member and one of the few Republican legislators willing to criticize the Governor publicly. “As far as I’m concerned the words don’t match up with the action.” As Schmitz and other conservatives saw it, Reagan was making the government bigger, not smaller. Reagan responded in a late 1967 interview with CBS’s Harry Reasoner: “I think we’ve got some narrow groups on both sides of the spectrum, who are well-meant and sincere,” he said. “But I think that sometimes they would rather see someone go down in glorious defeat, jump off the cliff with flag flying, than recognize the practicality of trying to promote your philosophy and get it a step at a time. I try to point out to Republicans that it has taken the opposition thirty-five years to accomplish many of the things we’re opposing. We can’t believe that someplace out of the sunrise a man on a white horse is going to wave a wand and, if we get elected, change everything all at once.”44
Nancy had an even harder time than Ronnie adjusting to life in Sacramento, where it seemed that her every move was scrutinized by the local press. She told Hollywood Reporter columnist George Christy, “When Ronnie was first elected, someone said that it wouldn’t be much of a change for us, that politics was just like the picture business, that both were such public lives. But they were wrong. Politics is a completely different life. In the picture business you’re protected somewhat—by the studio, by your producer, and so on. In politics you aren’t protected in any way. You don’t belong for a night to a theater audience; you belong to everyone all the time.”45
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Her first run-in with the press came when the Reagans moved out of the Governor’s Mansion three months after they had moved in. Nancy hated living in the old gingerbread pile, which had been built for a Gold Rush merchant in 1877 and occupied by governors and their families since the turn of the century. It was already rat-infested and creaking by the time Earl Warren lived there in the 1940s, and Goodwin Knight’s wife would chide legislators who came for dinner about the need for a new official residence. Although the three-story, white frame structure had six Italian marble fireplaces in its reception rooms, beautifully carved panel-ing and moldings, and a lovely cupola rising above its mansard roof, it stood on a major thoroughfare in the middle of downtown and faced two gas stations and a motel. Because of the traffic, Earl Warren Jr. remembered, it was “like living over an earthquake fault.”46 Nancy worried about the Skipper being run over or the whole place going up in flames. When the fire alarm went off one afternoon that first winter, the fire marshal who came to the house told Nancy that the only way to get out of her son’s room was to break a window with a dresser drawer. “That was it,” said Nancy.47
At their own expense, the Reagans rented a six-bedroom Tudor-style house with a pool on 45th Street, a wealthy enclave on the eastern