The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

sputtered, in no small part because Ronnie wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone. He was newly divorced from his first wife, Academy Award–winning actress Jane Wyman, and still in shock over the fact that she had gotten bored with him and walked out.

Ronnie was carrying a torch for Wyman that shone like a klieg light and had not yet given up on the possibility of a reconciliation. In the meantime, he had discovered that a suddenly single movie actor—even one whose career was on the downward slide—did not lack for available female companionship. His business manager gave him a stern lecture after discovering that Ronnie was spending $750 a month in nightclubs. In his biography of Ronnie, Edmund Morris made a tally of the women that he went out with in the two years after his first date with Nancy. Morris came up with “at least sixteen different young and beautiful actresses, from Doris Day and Rhonda Fleming to the peachy and not-yet-legal Piper Laurie. God knows how many more there were or how many came back to spend the night with him in his hillside apartment, with its celestial view of the sparkling city. He was always shy about speaking of such matters when I interviewed him as an old man, and, to tell the truth, I didn’t think it was my biographical business.” Ronnie did admit to sleeping with so many women that he once woke up with one of them and realized he did not know who she was.

All this sexual hyperkinesia aside, Ronnie would later acknowledge that when he met Nancy, he was broken inside. His heart, as he put it, was in a “deep freeze.” And as a result, he almost blew his chance for happiness with her. “This story, I know, will be a disappointment to those who want romance neatly packaged. The truth is, I did everything wrong, dating her off and on, continuing to volunteer for every Guild trip to New York—in short, doing everything which could have lost her if Someone up there hadn’t been looking after me,” he wrote. “In spite of my determination to remain foot-loose, in spite of my belief that the pattern of my life was all set and would continue without change, nature was trying to tell me something very important.”

It would take a long time before he understood what that was. In later years, he would often quote Clark Gable: “There’s nothing more important than approaching your own doorstep and knowing that someone is on the other side of the door, listening for the sound of your footsteps.” Ronnie in particular had an emotional need for such a woman. In his life, he had known three of them. One was his devoted and protective mother; the second, his grounded, tough-willed high school sweetheart; and finally, his restless and ambitious first wife. The trio had little in common except strength and determination. But all of them had connected with something inside him, something that he kept the rest of the world from seeing.

Nancy, with her razor-sharp instincts about people, no doubt sensed there were deep roots to Ronnie’s remoteness. Like hers, his childhood had been one of upheaval and insecurity. Ronnie’s father was John Edward “Jack” Reagan, a charismatic shoe salesman and alcoholic whose high-flying dreams inevitably crashed when they hit the wall of reality. With every fresh failure or new scheme, the family moved again.

The Reagans lived five places in Illinois before Ronnie was nine. For the first three months of his life, during the late winter and spring of 1911, the family occupied an apartment on the second floor of a building at 111 Main Street, in Tampico, an Illinois farming town of fewer than 1,300 people. Various accounts have it that they lived over a bakery, a restaurant, or a bar. The next three years found them in a rented house on the outskirts of town, across the street from the rail depot. At the end of 1914, they moved to the South Side of Chicago, where they lived in a shabby apartment building near the University of Chicago. It was lit, Ronnie recalled later, “by a single gas jet brought to life with the deposit of a quarter in a slot down the hall.”

The following December, the family decamped for Galesburg—as it happens, Loyal Davis’s hometown. Ronnie’s memory from there was of big green trees and dark red-brick streets. He started first grade in Galesburg at the age of five, but before he finished second, they moved again, to Monmouth, a college town in western Illinois, where they lived from early 1917 to August 1919. Ronnie recalled how the downtown celebrated the end of World War I on November 11, 1918: “The streets were suddenly filled with people, bonfires were lighted, and grown-ups and children paraded down the street singing and carrying torches in the air. I was only seven, but old enough to share in the hopes of everyone in Monmouth that we had fought ‘the war to end all wars.’ ”

Not long after that, they were back in Tampico, living above Pitney’s Shoe Store, the place where his father had been working when Ronnie was born. By then, Jack had been made the manager and was promised he could become a part owner. Instead, Mr. Pitney made Jack his partner in another venture: a fancier store called the Fashion Boot Shop. It was in Dixon, a city of about ten thousand people that straddled the Rock River about a hundred miles west of Chicago. The family moved there in December 1920 and finally seemed ready to settle down. They lived on the rougher side of town, but to nine-year-old Ronnie, Dixon was heaven, “a small universe where I learned standards and values that would guide me for the rest of my life.” Of all the places where the family had lived, it is the two-story, Queen Anne–style rental house they occupied in Dixon for three years that has since been