Ronnie and Nancy (56 page)

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something of a tomboy. “Patti and I used to go down to Bristol Circle on Sunset with a bunch of our gang. It was all dirt in those days, and we would make these little mounds and jump off them on our bikes. Brentwood and Pacific Palisades were almost like the country then, and we were all really farm kids in a way, living in a very sophisticated environment.”77

When Patti was about nine, Betty Adams recalled, “Nancy wanted her to go to dancing school at Miss Ryan’s, which was near Hancock Park on Wilshire across from Perrino’s.” (Perrino’s restaurant was to L.A. society what Chasen’s was to Hollywood.) “My daughter, Fonza, was in the same grade as Patti, and we made sure they went places together, whether they wanted to or not. Ronnie and Nancy and I would drive our girls to the dancing school about five o’clock. Then we’d go to Perrino’s, eat our dinner, pick up the little darlings, and go home. . . . We did have fun together with the kids. We sent them to Douglas Camp up in Carmel Valley, and Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale sent their child. Nancy and I took Fonza and Patti to the train ourselves. We put them on the train and cried all the way home. Nancy was a good mother. You never read about that.”78

Betsy Bloomingdale recalled driving the children to camp with the Reagans some summers. “That’s really how Alfred and I became friends with Nancy and Ronnie,” she said. “The four of us would stay at John Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch for the weekend. It was right next to the Douglas Camp, and they had beautiful bungalows and wonderful food. I remember the kids would all be lined up at the camp with their hands out, and Ronnie would inspect their fingernails.”79

Betsy said Patti was a “sullen” child, and Patti describes how unhappy she was in her 1992 book,
The Way I See It.
She craved her father’s attention and dreaded her mother’s. Her father, she told reporter Nancy Collins years later, “was not terribly engaged” in family matters. Her mother, on the other hand, was “too engaged, her presence too much felt. Overwhelming. There was no balance.”80 In her telling, Patti and her mother argued about her clothes, her weight, her hair, her bathroom habits, even the way she would stare silently out the window of the car when her mother was driving her home from school. “Don’t you ignore me, young lady,” Nancy would scream. “Why can’t you just do what I say?”81

Patti wrote that her mother slapped her for the first time when she was eight, and that it became a regular occurrence, but in 2004 she told me that her memoir had been written in anger, with a certain amount of exaggeration.82 She also wrote that her mother’s rage was worst when her father was 3 0 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House away on his G.E. trips, and that when he came home, he refused to credit her complaints. On the contrary, he would tell Patti that her behavior was the reason Nancy was so nervous and had to take the tranquilizers that Patti had found in her mother’s medicine cabinet.83 “My mother is a woman who needs to control everything around her,” Patti concludes. “Yet, inside, she doubts her ability to do so.”84 From Nancy’s point of view, back then Patti was the control freak. “I remember at Christmastime my mother and father would be there, and Patti would write these little Christmas plays,”

she told me. “She’d give a part to Ron, but Ron never had anything to do.

He’d just be standing in the background. Finally, one day he walked off. He wouldn’t stand there anymore. It was always all about Patti. She had to be the center of attention.”85

Even Patti’s rosier memories seem to have strange endings. When she was eight, she recounted in a 1999
George
magazine article, her pet fish, Blackie, died, and her father gave it a “fish funeral.” He dug a small grave in the backyard, tied two sticks into a cross, and gave a eulogy. “I was so into this ceremony, and I was having so much fun, that when it ended, and after my father had asked me if I felt better, I said, ‘Yeah, can we go kill another one?’ ”86

In 1959, at the recommendation of a child psychiatrist, Michael Reagan came to live with his father and Nancy. Now fourteen and severely troubled, he had not had an easy time of it since his mother eloped with Freddy Karger shortly after his father remarried. Jane’s second marriage had fallen apart within two years, and she had moved several times. In 1955, with Loretta Young as her godmother, Jane converted to Catholicism and had Maureen and Michael baptized alongside her. Maureen was dispatched to a Catholic boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, and in 1958 to Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia. Meanwhile, Michael was bounced from the Chadwick School to a public elementary school in Westwood—he would later claim he was sexually molested at age eight by a male counselor at an after-school gymnastics camp87—and then to the Good Shepherd Catholic school in Beverly Hills for fifth grade. He had to repeat that grade at St. John’s Military Academy, a Catholic boarding school in downtown Los Angeles, where he stayed for two years. He spent seventh grade at a private school in Newport Beach, where Jane briefly lived, and where he was a straight-D student. By then Jane had her own TV show at Revue Productions and was hardly ever at home, and when she was they fought bitterly.

The Group: 1958–1962

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He was thrilled when his father agreed to take him in—“I thought that at last I would be living with a family unit just like a normal kid.”88 But he would soon be let down once again: he was going to be a boarder, not a day student, at the Jesuit-run Loyola High School, despite the fact that it was only a half hour away from San Onofre Drive. He spent only weekends with his father and stepmother, and he slept on the living room couch. Several months after he arrived, an additional bedroom was added onto the house for Ron’s nurse, and Michael was given the daybed in the playroom.

“The first thing Nancy did when I moved in was send me to the dentist,” Michael writes in his memoir,
On the Outside Looking In
. “I had not been to the dentist in years. . . . [He] discovered I had almost a dozen cav-ities. Nancy was livid with Mom because my teeth had been let go for so long. She also took me shopping for new clothes, something Mom rarely had time for.” But, he adds, “like everyone else in the house, including Dad, I was a little intimidated by Nancy.”89 On Sunday mornings, when the family went to services at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church, Michael was left home, because he was a Catholic.90 According to Patti, her parents avoided any mention of Jane Wyman, and she was never made to feel that Michael was her true brother.91

Both Patti and Michael looked forward to Saturdays at the Malibu Hills ranch, when Ronnie took them riding, and Nancy often stayed home. “I planned all week what I wanted to say to him,” Patti later wrote. “I thought if I found the right words, shared enough thoughts with him, he would reach across the distance.”92 “I didn’t dare talk with Dad about my feelings,”

recalled Michael, “because he always seemed to be uncomfortable whenever he and I embarked on anything resembling a personal discussion.”93

“Ronnie certainly wasn’t given to sitting down and psychoanalyzing himself with the children,” Nancy Reagan admitted. “How many fathers did in those days?” But he made an effort, she pointed out: “There was an empty lot at the top of our street, and Ronnie would take the children and their friends up there on windy days to fly kites.”94 In 1961, when Maureen, who had dropped out of Marymount and was working as a typist in Washington, announced that she was marrying a policeman, Ronnie and Nancy attended the wedding. Jane, who remarried Fred Karger that year, did not.

Jane’s fifth and final marriage would last four years; Maureen’s first—to a wife beater, as it turned out—less than one.95

Michael’s grades were still perilously low, and he was suspended from Loyola several times for unruly behavior. He recalled that Nancy was furious 3 1 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House when she saw his report card. “You’re not living up to the Reagan name or image,” she told him, “and unless you start shaping up, it would be best for you to change your name and leave the house.” He snapped back, “Why don’t you just tell me the name I was born with, so at least when I walk out the door I’ll know what name to use.”

According to Michael, Nancy took up his challenge and managed to get ahold of his adoption papers. She told him his real name was John L.

Flaugher and that his birth parents had not been married.96 “My relationship with Nancy was now strained to the point where we spoke to each other only when necessary,” he writes.97 His father blamed him for “pressuring” her into giving him the information, but tried to encourage Michael by offering to get him into Eureka College if he made it through high school. Michael had a counterproposal: “If you send me out of state to a coed high school for my last year, I promise to get good grades.”98

Loyal Davis pulled some strings, and in September 1962, Michael was enrolled at the Judson School in Arizona, where his grades improved and he became the quarterback on the football team and the star pitcher on the baseball team. When his parents couldn’t make a baseball game just before Easter the following year, Loyal and Edith filled in for them. “My first time up at bat with two men on base,” Michael remembered, “I heard DeeDee yell, ‘You better hit a home run, you little sonofabitch.’ . . . I was so excited that I pounded out my first and last home run.”99

On July 25, 1962, Nelle Reagan died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-nine in a nursing home in Santa Monica.100 “Mother’s passing was peaceful and without pain,” Reagan wrote to Lorraine Wagner, a fan who had become a regular correspondent. “It was just a matter of going without waking. I’m sure it was what she wanted, too, because these past few years have found her unable to do any of the things that had always made her life meaningful.”101 Neil’s wife, Bess, told me that she thought Nelle had Alzheimer’s, though it wasn’t called that then, and Reagan himself said as much to Edmund Morris.102 In 1954, Nelle had told Wagner in a letter, “I have hardening of the arteries in my head—and it hurts just to think.”103 By 1957 she was complaining of memory lapses and heart problems. That summer she wrote friends in Dixon: “I am a shut in. I can’t drive a car any more so it was sold this last week. I will be 74 years young this month of July, and am grateful to God, to have been spared this long
The Group: 1958–1962

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life. Yet when each attact [sic] comes I whisper—‘Please God, let it be now, take me home.’ ”104

“She had a lady who came and lived with her,” Bess Reagan told me, adding, “Ronald paid for it.”105 In 1958, Nancy arranged for Nelle to be put into the nursing home, and most of her possessions were moved to Neil’s house in Bel Air, which burned to the ground in 1961. The only things Neil and Bess managed to save were their silverware and Nelle’s Bible.106

In 1962, Nancy was made a member of the Colleagues, signifying her full acceptance into Los Angeles’s hardest-to-crack social clique. Betsy Bloomingdale, Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, and Betty Adams had all been members for several years. The private charity had been founded in 1950 by nine society women headed by Lucy Toberman, whose husband’s grandfather was mayor of Los Angeles in the 1870s—and who had introduced Marion to Earle Jorgensen—and Onnalee Doheny, whose husband’s grandfather discovered oil downtown in 1892. “I was part of the original group,”

said Erlenne Sprague, who was then married to her first husband, Voltaire Perkins, a wealthy lawyer who played the judge on television’s
Divorce Court
.

“They just picked out women that were very socially involved.”107

The Colleagues met once a month for lunch at one another’s houses, which was one reason they limited membership to fifty. Every Saturday before Mother’s Day, they held their annual “Glamour Sale,” at which the ladies—clad in “Colleagues Blue” smocks—sold their old furs, designer clothes, and jewelry and gave the proceeds to the Big Sister League’s homes for unwed mothers. The sale was originally held in Carlotta Kirkeby’s ballroom—her husband owned the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, the Drake in Chicago, the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, and La Quinta resort near Palm Springs. By 1960 it had become so popular that it was moved to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and everything from art and antiques to sheets and children’s clothes were added to the inventory. At the time Nancy joined, the Colleagues was almost exclusively Gentile, and only a few Hollywood wives had made the cut, including Mal Milland and Clark Gable’s fourth wife, Kay Spreckels, an heiress to the sugar fortune. The membership was expanded to sixty-five in the early 1970s, which is when Harriet Deutsch and Fran Stark, among others, were asked to join.108

“I sponsored Nancy,” said Erlenne Sprague. “I sponsored a lot of these girls—Marion, Betsy, Betty Adams—because they were good workers 3 1 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and good friends and it just made the whole group so special.” As Sprague explained, the Colleagues continued to grow over the years, adding two auxiliary organizations—Les Amis (“the mothers and aunts and grandmothers of some of us”) in 1962, and the Chips (“our daughters and granddaughters”) in 1966—and raising millions for both unwed mothers and abused children while maintaining its cachet as L.A.’s chicest charity.109

The year Nancy became a Colleague, Kurt Niklas, the popular maître d’

at Romanoff ’s, opened the Bistro in Beverly Hills with the director Billy Wilder. Backed by Alfred Bloomingdale and David May, among others, the restaurant became the Group’s canteen. Nancy and her friends now had their own charity, their own designer, Jimmy Galanos, their own hairdresser, Julius of Saks, their own flower arranger and party planner, David Jones, and their own interior decorator, Billy Haines, as well as a regular place to lunch. They also had their own resident political philosopher—and no one found him boring. “Ronnie was always so fantastic about talking after dinner,” said Erlenne Sprague. “He would talk about the government and how it was just too big and this and that. And we would sit there absolutely spell-bound, listening to him. Everybody thought he was great.”110