Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [271]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House rubbed them together acted like soap. I walked up, and there he was rubbing these things between his hands, cleaning the creosote off.”21
“Since the day we bought the ranch,” Ronnie said, “if Nancy or I wanted to think something out, there’s been no better place to do it than Rancho del Cielo. . . . During those first months after we left Sacramento, I spent a lot of time . . . riding around the ranch thinking about the future.”22
On Halloween 1975, Ronnie and Nancy called a family meeting at San Onofre Drive to tell the children that he had decided to run for president.
Maureen, the self-described “political junkie” of the family, arrived first.23
She had campaigned hard for Nixon in 1972—George Shultz, then secretary of the treasury, even wrote Reagan a note calling her “terrific.” But, at thirty-four, Maureen was not having much success in launching an acting career, and had taken up with a fifty-five-year-old song-and-dance man named Gene Nelson. Her new beau had actually acted with her father in one of his last films for Warner Bros., but that did not endear him to Ronnie or Nancy.
Then came Michael with his fiancée Colleen Sterns. After a brief first marriage—to an eighteen-year-old belle from Mobile, Alabama—that produced a son in 1973, Michael had finally found a source of stability in Colleen, “a girl who was equal in strength to Mom or Nancy.”24 He had a good job selling boats in Costa Mesa, and with Colleen’s help he was working off his considerable debts, while trying to follow the advice his father had given him about marriage: “You’ll never get in trouble if you say
‘I love you’ at least once a day.”25
Patti was not at the meeting. Her parents claimed she didn’t want to come; she said she hadn’t been asked.26 A year earlier, while working as a singing hostess at the Great American Food and Beverage Company in Santa Monica, she had met Bernie Leadon, the pot-smoking steel guitarist for the Eagles, one of the most popular rock bands of the early 1970s.
They were now living together in Topanga Canyon, the hippie haven near Malibu, which her angry father told her was a sin.27 Marion Jorgensen told me that Nancy tried to get along with Patti during this period and even had her friends buy “these little beaded things she was making out there in the woods.”28 In 1974, when Patti and Bernie co-wrote a song for the Eagles called “I Wish You Peace,” her album credit read Patti Davis. Patti saw dropping her father’s name as a “turning point.” As she wrote, “There was Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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an underlying reason for choosing my mother’s maiden name. . . . It was a child’s way of asking for a parent’s approval.”29
The youngest Reagan, who was still living at home but refused to be called the Skipper, had also turned rebellious as he approached eighteen. In the summer of 1973, Ronnie and Nancy had taken him on a four-day horseback trip through Yosemite National Park, with no tents, just sleeping bags, and Ron was so proud of his mother that he had her tin cup engraved,
“To the World’s Greatest Camper—Sport—and Mom.”30 The following year, however, he was expelled from Webb, one of the top boarding schools in California. “They threw me out halfway through my junior year,” Ron said. “I was too much of a troublemaker. Too prankish. My mother was mortified. . . . She thought my life was over. But my father had a good sense of humor about that sort of thing. He took it with a little more grace.”
Now that he was back in Pacific Palisades and enrolled at the prestigious Harvard School, the neighbors often heard him screaming at his mother,
“Leave me alone! . . . All I want is to be left alone.”31
A likely source of these arguments