Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [70]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House a heart attack on May 18, 1941, at age fifty-seven. According to family lore, he died while waiting for an ambulance that never came; Nelle had called the nearest ambulance service, not knowing that, because of a jurisdictional dispute, Beverly Hills ambulances were not permitted to cross the bound-ary into West Hollywood.95 Ronnie was in Atlantic City, on a Warners promotional tour. When Nelle reached him by telephone, she urged him not to fly, saying she would delay the funeral until he and Jane could return home by train.96
Pat O’Brien was among the small group of mourners at St. Victor’s Catholic Church in West Hollywood. Ronnie, as he told Maureen years later, was “beyond crying. My soul was just desolate, that’s the only word I can use. Desolate. And empty. And then all of a sudden I heard somebody talking to me, and I knew that it was Jack, and he was saying, ‘I’m OK, and where I am it’s very nice. Please don’t be unhappy.’ And I turned to [Nelle], who was sitting with me, and I said, ‘Jack is OK, and where he is he’s very happy.’ And it was just like it went away. The desolation wasn’t there anymore, the emptiness was all gone.”97
Four months later, in September 1941, it was Nelle’s turn to share in her son’s stardom. This time the junket was to Dixon, Illinois, for Louella Parsons Day and the premiere of International Squadron, starring Ronald Reagan—the man who hated to fly—as a daredevil American pilot fighting with the British Royal Air Force against the Nazis. This double home-coming started with the biggest parade in Dixon’s history, with five bands and fifteen floats, followed by the dedication of the Louella Parsons Wing at the Dixon Hospital, a banquet at the Masonic temple, the premiere at the Dixon Theater, and a Hollywood Ball at the town armory.98 Ronnie invited Nelle’s old friends from her True Blue Bible class to the premiere, which was a benefit for the hospital, and mother and son were put up at Hazelwood, the Walgreen estate on the Rock River, along with the rest of Louella’s entourage, including Bob Hope, Ann Rutherford, George Montgomery, and Joe E. Brown.99 Charles Walgreen’s widow, Myrtle, gave a lunch for two hundred on the lawn where a decade earlier young Reagan, then a caddie for Mr. Walgreen, had lolled in a hammock.100
“I want all of you to know that I did not sleep last night, thinking of my trip back to Dixon, where I could meet my old friends,” Reagan said in his speech at the kickoff of the parade. “I counted the 77 persons whom I have been credited with pulling out of the Rock River at Lowell Park many times during the night.”101 As Louella rose to cut him off, Bob Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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Hope’s sidekick, Jerry Colonna, whispered, “This fellow must be running for Congress!”102
“During the couple of days it took to reach Dixon, I got to know Ronnie quite well,” recalled Ann Rutherford, then an MGM starlet, who was also traveling with her mother. “You know, who else are you going to talk to? Picture people stuck with picture people when you went into the dining car, and over a couple of dinners my mother and I were so impressed with him. He had an idea about everything, especially political things. My mother shook her head and said to me, ‘He is not going to stay in the picture business. He has far more important fish to fry, and he’ll do it.’ He really had suggestions on everything. For instance, he said to me, ‘You do have a three-check bankbook, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, why?’ He said,
‘Well, what do you do with your canceled checks?’ I said, ‘I put a rubber band around them and throw them in a shoe box.’ And he said, ‘Well, what you should do is, when you get them back, take a little Scotch tape and tape them to the stubs. That way you know where everything is.’ ”103
Clouding the festivities in Dixon was the inevitability