Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [270]
“From the first day we saw it, Rancho del Cielo cast a spell over us,” Reagan would write of his fourth and last ranch. “No place before or since has ever given Nancy and me the joy and serenity it does.”17 The Reagans had closed on their 688-acre hideaway in the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara just a few weeks before the end of the governorship. It had been found for them by Bill Wilson, whose avocado ranch was a few miles away.
Nancy was nervous at first about the torturously twisting seven-mile-long road that led to the remote property, but as Wilson recalled, “Ronnie fell in love with the place immediately—before we got anywhere near the house.
As we got closer to it, he said, ‘It’s absolutely gorgeous here. I love it.’”18
Nancy, too, was swept away by the sheer beauty of the place, with its old oaks and madrones, riding trails crisscrossing the chaparral, and views of the Pacific in one direction and the horse farms and vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley in the other.
A tiny—“and I mean tiny,” as Nancy put it—adobe house built in 1871
by the property’s first owner, José Jesús Pico, a homesteader from Mexico, sat in the middle of a rolling pasture, and cattle grazed under a smog-free blue sky. A subsequent proprietor had named the place Tip Top Ranch, and while the Reagans changed the name, they maintained it as a working livestock operation, with twenty-two head of cattle and four horses, to take advantage of California tax breaks for agricultural preserves. The New York Times estimated that the $900 in property tax they paid in 1979 would otherwise have been closer to $42,000.19
Over the next two years, Ronnie spent most of his free time fixing up Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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his “Ranch in the Sky,” usually making the two-hour drive from Pacific Palisades with Barney Barnett, the retired California highway patrolman who had been his driver in Sacramento, and Dennis LeBlanc, the young former state trooper who had been his security man and now traveled with him on his speaking trips. “Sometimes the three of us would go up and back every day for three days in a row,” LeBlanc recalled. “Anne, the Reagans’ housekeeper, would pack a lunch for us or we’d stop at a Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the way up.” They completely gutted the house, converting its screened-in wrap-around porch into an L-shaped living room and dining area, replaced the asbestos roof with Spanish-style tiles, repaired old fences and built new ones. Nancy helped Ronnie paint the house and lay a new floor in the kitchen. They also dug a pond behind the house and named it Lake Lucky.20
The end result was an exceedingly modest, 1,500-square-foot cottage heated only by two fireplaces. There were two bedrooms, one off the kitchen for Anne Allman. The master bedroom had sunny yellow walls and a matching chenille bedspread. The living room sofas were covered in brown cotton, the armchairs in the den were done in orange plaid, and paintings of horses, cowboys, and Western landscapes hung in every room. As I toured the place in 1999, I kept thinking, Nancy Reagan stayed here? It was a far cry from Sunnylands, or even her parents’ villa in manicured Biltmore Estates. But it had a simplicity and coziness that said a lot about the couple that spent so much time there together.
On a rise just above the house were a tack barn and a spruced-up trailer, where the kids stayed. “There was always a project at the ranch, and if you went up there to stay, you helped,” said the Wicks’ son C.Z., who had become close to young Ron. “On one of the first weekends I went there, they were building a patio in front of the house. Ron and I quarried the rocks for that—putting them in the back of their ancient Ford station wagon and bringing them down to the house.”
C. Z. Wick explained that when guests arrived at the turnoff from Pacific Coast Highway, “you’d call from the gas station down at the bottom of Refugio Road and say you were coming up. The Governor would always be waiting to