Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [235]
According to both Ronnie and Nancy, selling their beloved Malibu Canyon ranch was an emotional wrench; it was where they had courted, where Nancy got to know Maureen and Michael, where they took Patti and the Skipper on weekends. It also made Reagan an out-and-out millionaire for the first time in his life; he told Lou Cannon in 1968, “I could not have run for office unless I sold the ranch.” Sacramento reporters, including Cannon, “smelled a sweetheart deal,” as the highly lucrative sale Sacramento: 1967–1968
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had been worked out by Jules Stein and Taft Schreiber with Fox chief Darryl Zanuck, who was also a Reagan supporter.99
Reagan had paid $85,000 for the 290-acre property in 1951, or about $293 an acre. In December 1966 he sold 236 acres to Fox, which owned 2,500 adjacent acres that the studio used as a location for its Westerns.
The $1.9 million purchase price worked out to $8,178 per acre, or a profit of more than 2,500 percent. French Smith was Reagan’s lawyer for the sale and became one of three trustees of the blind trust established for the Reagans the day he became Governor—the other two were Bill Wilson and Jules Stein. Justin Dart would replace the aging Stein a few years later, but Oppenheimer Industries, a Kansas City–based investment firm run by a son of Doris Stein’s from her first marriage, continued to manage the trust’s assets. Meanwhile, Reagan had retained fifty-four acres at Malibu Canyon and used it as a down payment of $165,000 on the Rancho California land in 1968; a year later a New York–based corporation controlled by Jules Stein bought the fifty-four acres from the Rancho California developers for the same price.
Two more factors would make these transactions appear suspicious: in 1968, Reagan signed a tax bill advantageous to Fox and several other movie companies that had been vetoed by Pat Brown; and in 1974, just before he left office, the State Park and Recreation Board purchased the entire Fox property, including the former Reagan ranch, for $4.8 million, or $1,800 an acre. Numerous investigations and a lawsuit by a local Democrat, however, produced conflicting opinions regarding fluctuating real estate values but no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Stein or Reagan.100
One last note about Malibu Canyon: in the next-to-last segment of Portrait of a Politician’s Wife, Nancy and Betsy are sitting in the back of a Lincoln Continental, being driven to the ranch for a farewell visit, Nancy in a white button-down shirt, jeans, and Keds, Betsy in an apricot silk blouse and pants with matching sandals. “Does the ranch have a name?”
asks Betsy. “We named it Yearling Row,” says Nancy, “because yearling was the business of the ranch, and row after Kings Row.” “Oh, that’s marvelous,” says Betsy, presumably unaware of the Jane Wyman connection.101
In August 1968, Betsy Bloomingdale was at Nancy’s side at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, where Reagan sought the party’s 3 7 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House presidential nomination, some felt prematurely. So were Marion Jorgensen and Betty Wilson—all the women chipped in and brought along Julius Bengtsson to keep their bouffants crisp and high in the humidity of South Florida in summer. Alfred Bloomingdale, Earle Jorgensen, and Bill Wilson were part of the California delegation, which was chaired by William French Smith and pledged to Reagan as a favorite son. Although most observers thought Richard Nixon, making an extraordinary comeback from the defeats of 1960 and 1962, was all but assured of the nomination, the Kitchen Cabinet was not about to give up. As Holmes Tuttle recounted,
“We went from delegation to delegation. Len Firestone was right there. He would talk to one, I’d talk to the next one. Justin Dart, Henry Salvatori, Taft Schreiber, Raymond Lee, Lee Kaiser, [Jack] Hume, all