Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [66]
the Heather, a small chapel with a Scottish theme in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the burial ground of Old Hollywood. “It was doomed,” noted Leonora Hornblow, who was a bridesmaid. “But they were very attractive together and crazy about each other.”69
The bride wore a pale blue gown of heavy satin, high-collared and long-sleeved, set off by a mink hat and a mink muff on which she had pinned a purple orchid corsage. The groom wore a dark suit. In their wedding 1 0 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House photograph, Reagan looked waxen, perhaps because he had been in bed with the flu and was still running a fever.70 The ceremony was performed by Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer of the Hollywood-Beverly Christian Church. The wedding party was mostly family: Jack and Nelle, Neil and Bess Reagan, Emma Fulks and Elsie Wyatt, who was matron of honor. Reagan asked one of his Iowa friends, Will Scott, to be his best man, passing over Neil. Louella Parsons’s third husband, Harry “Docky” Martin, an alcoholic urologist who specialized in venereal diseases, walked the bride down the aisle.71
Parsons, who had been ceaselessly promoting Jane and Ronnie as the ideal all-American couple next door and took credit for engineering the marriage, gave the reception at her house on North Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. Hornblow thought Nelle seemed out of sorts at the party: “She looked like a pioneer woman. I don’t mean she wasn’t well dressed, she was. She wasn’t forthcoming. She was cold and uncommunicative. But everyone was extremely nice to her. Who would be rude to Ronnie’s mother?”72 Louella drank almost as much her husband, which may have been the cause of her chronic incontinence—she was famous for leaving a puddle wherever she sat—and perhaps that bothered Nelle.73
The newlyweds drove to Palm Springs that night. As if getting married in a cemetery wasn’t omen enough, it rained in the desert for most of their one-week honeymoon. Fifty years later I asked Jane Wyman if she remembered the first time she went to Palm Springs—which was on that honeymoon. “No, not particularly,” she said, flashing me such a cold and angry look that I thought she might murder me right there in her pink-and-lavender retirement condominium.74
“Theirs is the perfect marriage,” Louella Parsons proclaimed in a column shortly after the wedding. “Jane always seemed so nervous and tense before she found Ronnie. She was a girl on the make—for life, for love. I think she wanted—well, everything. But steady, solid, decent young Ronnie has slowed down her pace, and it is all for the best. Yes, it was an ‘opposites-attract’ thing, but I’m predicting here and now that these opposites will celebrate their twenty-fifth and fiftieth wedding anniversaries—together.”75
The first two years of the marriage were full of promise and good news.
Their daughter, Maureen Elizabeth Reagan, was born on January 4, 1941.
The Meiklejohn Agency was bought by the increasingly powerful Music Corporation of America, and Lew Wasserman, the slick young protégé of Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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MCA founder Jules Stein, became their agent. By the fall of 1941 Wasserman had renegotiated both of their contracts at Warners, tripling their salaries overnight. Ronnie was now making $1,650 a week, Jane $1,500, and both of them had been elected to the SAG board.76 They bought a plot of land on Cordell Drive, high up in the Hollywood Hills with a view that extended from the Pacific Ocean to downtown Los Angeles, and built an eight-room “English farmhouse,” with big picture windows and a huge stone fireplace, inspired by Rosalind Russell’s house in This Thing Called Love. (They actually borrowed the plans from Columbia Pictures.)77 They continued to see the Iowa crowd, but they were also becoming friendly with such