Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [252]
I got out in the hall, and something made me turn back. I returned to his room and kissed him on the cheek. When I landed in Sacramento, they told me he had died. . . . I flew back on the next plane to be with Ursula.
She asked if Ronnie would deliver the eulogy and, of course, he said yes.
But the morning of the funeral he confessed to me that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get through it without breaking up.”55
Ursula Taylor would later tell Laurence Leamer that Nancy “took over for me. . . . I was in shock. She made all the phone calls, all the arrangements, picked out my wardrobe—everything. Nancy could never separate herself from Ronnie for more than a day if she could help it, and she stayed with me several days and took care of me.” Within the week, Ursula turned to Nancy again, when her twenty-three-year-old son by her first marriage, Michael Theiss, was found dead in his bed of a drug overdose. Ursula recalled that of all the condolence notes she received, sixteen-year-old Patti’s was “so sensitive . . . the most beautiful.”56
Patti, who had just started her summer vacation from Orme, remembered her father being despondent over Robert Taylor’s death. He would come home from work at five every day,” she recalled, “but he didn’t seem part of those months.” Perhaps because the double tragedy in the Taylor family made them appreciate each other more, Patti and Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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her mother enjoyed “one of our rare cease-fires” that summer, taking sun by the pool and discussing books they’d give each other to read.57 In August the Reagans left Sacramento for the beach house they had started renting every summer in Trancas, just north of Malibu. Nancy recalled Bill Buckley spending a night with them there when he was in Los Angeles to give a speech. “He really endeared himself to the kids,” she told me. “First of all, he went swimming at midnight with flashlights. The kids thought that was just wonderful. ‘Why don’t you two do that?’
Then the next morning he had peanut butter on toast for breakfast.
That sealed it.”58
Trancas brought out the best in the Reagans. “That was where we’d do most of our visiting as a family,” Maureen wrote. “I’d try to get out there one or two days each week, depending on my work schedule. On the days that all of us were there at the same time, we’d be out body-surfing and Dad would look around and marvel, ‘My goodness, all four of my pupils, all here at the same time!’ ”59
Maureen was single again, having divorced Lieutenant Sills in 1967, and had a public relations job with Pacific Southwest Airlines. Michael was trying to make a name for himself by racing speedboats—he had won the Outboard World Championship in 1967—even while trading on his father’s name by endorsing products, including the Power Mac-Six chain-saw and Hart, Schaffner and Marx suits. He had been called up for the draft in 1968, but was excused owing to a variety of medical problems, including a chronic ulcer. After he had a serious accident in a race in Texas, his father urged him to “make your hobby your real job” by selling boats instead of racing them, advice Michael chose not to take.60
Patti, meanwhile, was earning high grades at boarding school and fanta-sizing “about being in Haight-Ashbury, plaiting flowers in my hair, or at Berkeley, protesting the war.”61 In her sophomore year she had tried to run away to Alaska with the school dishwasher, but that had been forgiven; her parents didn’t know she was now having an affair with her married English teacher. After she had been caught smoking in March 1968, her father wrote her a four-page letter, reminding her that cigarettes were addictive and unhealthy—Nancy had given them up under pressure from Loyal the year before—and indicating that he realized her problems went beyond sneaking smokes. “You broke not only school rules but family rules and to do this you had to resort to tricks and deception. Why is this