Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [291]
took me out on the little lake at our ranch. ‘I didn’t bring a ukulele,’ he said. ‘So would it be all right if I just hummed?’ I know it sounds unbelievably corny, but I loved it.”23 That summer Ronnie found a boulder on one of the trails, carved his and Nancy’s initials into it, and drew a heart around them.
By then most of the alterations on the ranch house were complete, but Ronnie kept busy with Dennis LeBlanc and Barney Barnett building fences, clearing brush from riding trails, and chopping wood for the fireplaces. As LeBlanc told Peter Hannaford for his book Ronald Reagan and His Ranch, “He never asked Barney or me to do anything he wouldn’t do.
It was wonderful to watch the two of them together. They were only a year apart in age, and their birthdays were on the same day, February 6.
Barney would talk to him as if they were brothers. They’d be working on something and Barney would say, ‘Damn it, Governor, you can’t do it that way.’ He’d reply, ‘But Barney, I’m doing it.’ He attributed his physical well-being, his longevity to being able to go to the ranch, both for the physical nature of the work and for riding his horses. . . . He rode on an English saddle and everyone else up there rode Western. When you look at pictures of the group, he is always sitting straight as an arrow, while the others are slouching.”24
Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
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While her parents were celebrating the durability of their love, Patti, at twenty-four, decided to have her fallopian tubes tied, fearing, as she later wrote, that if she had a child, “I would become like my mother.” Like many of her generation, she felt it was wrong to bring a child into a world that was overpopulated, polluted, and threatened with nuclear extinction.25 Her decision coincided with the end of her relationship with Bernie Leadon; an affair with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson led to a pregnancy scare a month after she had been sterilized. In desperation Patti turned to her parents and told Nancy what she had done. “Only a crisis could have sent me to their front door,” Patti wrote, adding, “For the next three years, we had the longest truce in our battle-scarred history.”26
The previous fall, Ron had announced that he was dropping out of Yale University after only two months to pursue a career in ballet. The issue had been brewing since his senior year at the Harvard School, where he started studying dance after it was introduced into the curriculum.
Nancy, who tended to blame Patti’s transgressions on her but Ron’s on anyone else, told me that her son’s interest in ballet stemmed from his relationship with the older woman, which was a continuing source of contention between him and his mother. Ron had moved in with the Wicks during his last year of high school, partly because his parents were away campaigning so much, partly because he wanted to avoid confrontations with his mother, who had told off his married girlfriend one day when she ran into her at the Bistro.
His father had handed him his diploma at the Harvard School graduation in June 1976, and his mother was elated when he was accepted at Yale, after Bill Buckely wrote a strong letter of recommendation. Ron broke the news that he was casting aside an Ivy League education over dinner in New York the night before he and his parents were to spend Thanksgiving at the Buckleys’ in Connecticut. Nancy and Ronnie were extremely upset and shared their concern with Pat and Bill. “Such a decision is not easily received in any household,” Bill Buckley wrote in his 1983 memoir, Overdrive. “In their household, it was received with True Shock.”27
Among the