Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [313]
From the start of the campaign, the national press, particularly female reporters, fixated on what came to be called The Gaze. “When I would look at Ronnie when he spoke, that wasn’t an act,” Nancy Reagan told me with an exasperated sigh in 1997. “That was the way I felt—no matter how many times I had heard a speech. The audience reaction always varies a bit—and I like to hear him speak. I adore him! And when I said, ‘My life began with Ronnie,’ well, it’s true. I mean, I had a wonderful life before then, but it really began.”150
There were also innumerable references to Nancy Reagan’s influence and behind-the-scenes machinations, especially after her part in the Sears purge was made known. As always, Nancy sought to downplay her role, repeatedly telling interviewers that she would never sit in on cabinet meet-Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
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ings the way Rosalynn Carter did. Ironically, whenever Mrs. Carter tried to defend herself from those who criticized her for being too powerful, she tended to come out sounding like Nancy. “Jimmy makes the decisions. All I do is tell him what I think. He takes it or leaves it. He might be influenced to a certain degree, but people just don’t know Jimmy Carter if they think I can persuade him to do something he doesn’t want to do.” The White House communications chief Patrick Caddell once even said of Rosalynn, “She’s got great antennae.”151
Unlike Rosalynn Carter, however, who usually campaigned on her own, Nancy didn’t like leaving Ronnie’s side. But as the race tightened, Stu Spencer convinced her that two could do more than one, and Peter McCoy—a Sotheby’s executive whose mother-in-law, Onnalee Doheny, was a friend of Nancy’s from the Colleagues—was hired to travel with her.
“Nancy and I would go off on our own trips for three or four days at a time,” McCoy told me. “The campaign plane would come into a city, and we’d jump on a small jet and go do a little outside business, and then join up with the tour later. Nancy is quite remarkable. We’d be up at eight in the morning and go all day long until ten or eleven at night, and then go back to the hotel—and Ronnie would be off on the main tour somewhere else.
I think they both really found it difficult to be separated. I’ve never seen anything quite like that. They would talk every night.”152
Reagan himself tried to explain their relationship to Lally Weymouth, who, for her Times article on Nancy, asked him what he thought his life would have been like if he hadn’t met her. “I don’t know,” he answered,
“except I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I was well aware that I was very lonely, although I guess I was a success in Hollywood and had all the perquisites that go with that. But I felt the need to love someone. . . . Has she influenced my life? Yes, because I’ve never been happier in my life than I have been with her. She is very much what you see. There is a gentleness to her, a fierce feeling of family loyalty. I miss her very much when we’re not together. We’re very happy. I imagine if I sold shoes, as my father did, she would have wanted to help me sell shoes. . . . She’s a very intelligent person. I don’t know of anything we don’t talk about. When anything happens that’s interesting or exciting, the first thought that enters my mind is how I’m going to tell her.”153
The press also tried to make an issue of the Reagan children’s not quite measuring up to the standards of the Republican Party platform, with its 5 0 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House high moral tone and disapproval of anything but the most traditional values. In an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Patti, who had just come from Jane Fonda’s exercise class, defended her family: q: Somebody else in New York wrote a fascinating piece about the Reagan children and said, Can you imagine four children, one an E.R.A. organizer and an actress, divorced twice; second, divorced once, sells gasohol and races boats; third, a rock musician and composer