I Love You, Ronnie (2 page)

On the pier Ronnie built at Rancho del Cielo, near Santa Barbara.

At first I kept them so that I could read them over again if I felt like it. Later, I kept them in a shopping bag. I brought them to Washington, where a lot more were added. It was a habit with Ronnie to write, to feel in touch, sometimes even when we were in the same room.

I have always loved them. In recent years, as Alzheimer’s disease has gradually taken away Ronnie’s ability to write, to remember, these letters have become even more important to me. They bring back so many memories.

The letters trace the story of our life. They begin as cheerful notes from the early years when we were dating. Then, in the first years of our marriage, they become deeper.

They were always a part of our life. In the fifties and sixties, when Ronnie traveled to make a movie or for General Electric, he sent me telegrams and long letters from across the country. Later on, he sent me funny notes from the California governor’s office, then cards from
Air Force One.
Sometimes, when we lived in the White House, he wrote me letters from across the room.

I gave Ronnie cards—often, two or three or more at a time—for every holiday imaginable:Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, even Halloween. But I wasn’t good at putting my feelings into words. Writing came so naturally to Ronnie, but it didn’t to me. He’d sit down, and, without drafts, without corrections, he’d come up with the most perfect and personal way of saying things—right off the top of his head. I was always struck by the way he did it, by the beauty of what he wrote and the ease with which he expressed himself. I wish I could have written back in just the same way.

—

Ronnie’s letters tell the story of our courtship and how it matured from a Hollywood romance into a deeply loving and long-lasting marriage. It’s interesting, I think, to see how our feelings grew over time, and to hear Ronnie express his wonder at his happiness. I believe he was able to share on paper feelings he wouldn’t have been comfortable saying out loud, especially in those early days of our life together. His writing built an even closer bond between us.

Ronnie is not a complicated man. He’s a private man—even, deep down, a shy man, I think—but not a complicated one. These letters are special because they give a lovely portrait of a man, in his own words. It is important, I think, to remember the happy times and the value of a life lovingly led, particularly now, given Ronnie’s illness and the darkness that shadows every human being’s existence. In the climate of today, I think it would be good for all of us to focus on the positive, the true, the things that really last, on character, humor, commitment, and love, and on the happy memories of a wonderful man and his life.

His letters were keepsakes in the past and have become my guardians of memory today. They recall happy times, and, above all, they preserve the voice of the Ronnie I love.

R
onnie’s habit of writing to me began almost as soon as we started to see each other. In those early days, he was traveling all the time: on location for films (like
The Last Outpost,
which he shot in Tucson), to New York for TV jobs, around the country as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Ronnie was on the road so much that we got to know each other slowly. And yet, when I opened the door to him for our first date, I knew that he was the man I wanted to marry.

We’d met in the fall of 1949 on a blind date—that is to say, a date that was blind for Ronnie but not for me. I’d seen him in pictures—and I liked what I saw. I was doing a picture—
East Side, West Side
—for Mervyn LeRoy, an old family friend, at Metro, when I saw my name on a list of Communist sympathizers. I went to Mervyn and said I was upset and asked if there was anything he could do. Later, it turned out that it was another Nancy Davis, but I was upset, so I said to Mervyn, “It’s not right. You’ve got to do something.”

Mervyn said not to worry; he would have the studio plant an item in Louella Parsons’s column. The next day, I went to him again and said, “A little item in Louella Parsons isn’t enough. My family’s really upset.” So Mervyn said, “I’ll call Ronald Reagan. He’s president of the Screen Actors Guild, and he’ll be able to straighten things out. Come to think of it,” he went on, “I think you two should know each other.”

Now, that seemed like a very good idea.

“Yes, Mervyn,” I said, remembering the handsome man I’d seen in movies, “I think so, too.”

“I’ll call him,” he said. “And he’ll call you.”

But Ronnie didn’t call, so the next day on the set, I said, “Mervyn, I’m
really
worried about this.”

So Mervyn called Ronnie again.

Ronnie told me later that he couldn’t understand why Mervyn was making such a fuss. But he called me that same day and asked me to go to dinner. “It’ll have to be early, though,” he said. “I have an early call.”

I said, “Yes, I have an early call, too.” I didn’t—and he didn’t—but we wanted to protect ourselves. He didn’t even know what I looked like.

Ronnie was on crutches that night, having recently broken his leg in a charity baseball game.

“How come you moved in on me like this?” Ronnie would write me from a lonely hotel room years later, when he was away on one of his long trips for G.E. Why do people fall in love? It’s almost impossible to say. If you’re not a teenager or in your early twenties, you’ve gone on a lot of dates and met a lot of people. When the real thing comes along, you just know it. At least I did.

Looking back now, I still can’t define what it was about Ronnie that made him seem so very perfect to me. I think we were just right for each other. And as the evening went on, I was more and more convinced. Ronnie had a great sense of humor, and he wasn’t like any other actor I knew—or anybody else in the movie business. He didn’t talk about himself. He didn’t talk about his movies. He talked about lots of things, but not about “my next picture, my last picture . . .” He was a Civil War buff, loved horses, and knew a lot about wine. In fact, he had a broad knowledge of a lot of different things. I loved to listen to him talk. I loved his sense of humor. I saw it clearly that very first night: He was everything that I wanted.

That evening, we went to dinner at LaRue’s, a glamorous “in” place on Sunset Strip where a lot of picture people used to go. After dinner, Ronnie told me that Sophie Tucker was performing at Ciro’s. I said I had never seen Sophie Tucker. “Well,” Ronnie said, “why don’t we just go and see the first show?”

“Okay,” I said. “Just the first show.”

We stayed for the second show, and by then we had admitted that neither of us had an early call the next day. We saw each other the next night and went to dinner at a place out by the ocean, and I think we both knew afterward that we wanted to see each other again.

Things progressed slowly, though. We each continued to see other people for a while. Ronnie wanted to be sure, and, even though I’d never been married before, I wanted to be sure, too.

Whenever Ronnie traveled, I waited for letters and for other little signs that he was really interested. They came from time to time, and each one felt to me like a breakthrough.

There was, for example, the first time Ronnie asked me to come out to his little eight-acre ranch in Northridge. I don’t think he’d ever asked anybody else there before, and I was thrilled. The ranch was out in the Valley, near a railroad track. It wasn’t a fancy place, but it was very special to Ronnie. He’d built a ring there to ride in, and put in some hurdles to practice jumping, and that’s what he did out there: rode and practiced jumping and bred horses with his partner, a very nice man named Nino Pepitone. It was a new world to me—you don’t have many ranches in Chicago, where I was raised.

It was another breakthrough when Ronnie introduced me to his children, Michael and Maureen. I was so nervous about meeting them, so afraid that they wouldn’t like me. Everything was a bit tentative at first. But as it turned out, we got along just fine. Soon, on every weekend and every holiday, when Ronnie went to visit the children, I’d go too. Maureen was often away at boarding school in those years, but Mike was around, and soon, every time we drove out to the ranch, he’d climb into my lap and stay there the whole time while I gave him a back rub.

Another breakthrough came when Ronnie introduced me to his mother, Nelle. She was living in a house that he’d bought for her and his father, Jack. Jack had died of a heart attack in 1941, and Nelle had been on her own ever since. She was an incredible woman. She visited men in jail and in the veterans’ hospitals and talked to them, usually about religion. She screened films that Ronnie brought her for the tuberculosis patients in OliveView Hospital. Ronnie and she had always been very close, and now that she was getting older and living alone, he stopped by and had breakfast with her every morning.

He brought me along on one of these visits. Nelle and I got along well right away. She very clearly adored Ronnie and wanted him to be happy. Fortunately, she seemed to feel that I was making him happy—and that I could make him happy in the long term.

She very quickly sized up the situation between us. She said to me: “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

I said yes.

She said: “I thought so.” And that was it. Nelle clearly saw where things were going, but she also knew that I would have to be patient.

The breakthroughs were, in fact, only baby steps. I just had to wait.

—

I was always so happy to get a letter from Ronnie in those early days. He wrote to me when he traveled—to stay connected, to reassure me, I think, and to let me know I was in his thoughts.

His humor, especially in difficult situations, comes through in his early letters, written before our feelings for each other had deepened and Ronnie began to write more directly about love. His letter from Tucson, Arizona, in 1950, for example, particularly shows Ronnie’s humor about himself and the light touch he brought to describing the world around him. When he wrote it, we’d been seeing each other for about a year—long enough for me to be upset when he went away and for him to tease me for being “agin’ it.”

Television in 1950 was not what it is today. It was a new and not very highly considered medium. It was just beginning to attract some Hollywood talent, but it was considered a big step down from pictures. The work was live and low-budget and you rehearsed in basements.

Ronnie was sought out often for TV roles, but he turned most of them down. He didn’t want to hurt his movie career by being typecast as a TV actor. But he did sometimes go to New York to make guest-star appearances on shows that he liked.

He wrote me this letter on one of his New York trips. I can’t remember what it was that he enclosed with it.

THE PLAZA

NEW YORK

[December 5, 1950]

Dear Nancy

Just enclosed this—thought you’d be interested. It was wrapped around some bread crusts the Guild office managed to smuggle into a TV mine where I’m being forced to work every day all day.

If this letter gets through tell all actors in the
free
world about this Siberia of thespians. Day after day in basement rehearsal halls we work and slave and in the few seconds of quiet between cues we can hear our ulcers growing. Mine is almost big enough to play a supporting part now but it is holding out for pictures.

They do have one custom that is cute thoug
h—
no prompter
.
I have
an extemporaneous address prepared for my first “memory loss”—it is entitled “Better Harry Cohen Yet” or “Pictures are Your Best Entertainment.”

I have hatched an escape plot (used one of the eggs I’ve already laid) and expect to hit Calif. around the 17
^th
or 18
^th
if I can lose the “secret police” on a floating ice flow. I got this latter idea from a
new
TV show about some kid who outwitted a character named “Legree.”

Gotta go—the guards are looking—through a viewer yet.

Ronnie