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

There was such a faction, Ronnie replied. What he did not reveal was that both he and Jane had been secret informants for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had given it names of people in the industry they believed harbored pro-Communist beliefs. His testimony walked a careful line. Ronnie argued that “in opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild, we make it work by ensuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts, they will never make a mistake.”

As Ronnie and Jane were being pulled in different directions, they hoped more children might help bring them closer again. The couple had wanted a son when Maureen was born and even joked on her birth announcement that the plan to name their firstborn Ronald Reagan Jr. was “no longer appropriate.” To much fanfare in the movie magazines, the couple adopted three-day-old Michael Edward in March 1945. Their plans to expand their family further came to a heartbreaking end two years later, when they lost an infant daughter, Christine, who was born four months prematurely in June 1947. She lived barely nine hours. Ronnie was not present for her birth or short life. He was in a different hospital two miles away, battling a life-threatening 104-degree fever and viral pneumonia.

Christine’s death was the beginning of the end, though Ronnie had trouble understanding or accepting it. He learned that his wife was thinking of separating from an interview she gave in late 1947. “There’s no use in lying,” said Jane, who was on a solo vacation in New York. “I am not the happiest girl in the world. It’s nothing that has happened recently. It’s an accumulation of things that has been coming on for a long time.”

Ronnie was stunned. Perhaps he had actually believed the idealized story line the studio had manufactured about his marriage. Maybe he had bought the gossamer narrative spun by Louella Parsons and the rest of the Hollywood press. “I suppose there had been warning signs, if only I hadn’t been so busy, but small-town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced,” he wrote later. “The plain truth was that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me that I had no resources to call upon.”

Stories soon followed quoting Ronnie as saying the couple had merely had “a tiff.” Some implied that Jane had been mentally unbalanced since losing the baby. Ronnie told Parsons that he was willing to give his wife some space: “Right now Jane needs very much to have a fling, and I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.”

There was another reason Ronnie was so bewildered to see his marriage fall to pieces. His only frame of reference was the family in which he had grown up. Nelle had endured so much to keep them all together. When Jane walked out, “he didn’t really see it coming, because his idea of marriage was his folks, where, despite all his father’s failings in terms of his unfortunate alcoholism, his mother’s goal in life was devoted to three things: her husband, and family, and church activities,” recalled longtime Reagan aide Ed Meese, who talked to Ronnie years later about this difficult period. “He assumed that’s the way husbands and wives operated.”

There followed a period of separations and failed efforts to put the marriage back together. At a couple of points, Ronnie stayed in an apartment hotel on Sunset Boulevard called the Garden of Allah, which—coincidentally—had once belonged to Nancy’s godmother Alla Nazimova. Jane took up residence on a ranch near Las Vegas so that she could obtain a divorce under Nevada’s lenient laws, but she couldn’t take the constant wind there and moved back to Hollywood. In April 1948 Ronnie announced they had reconciled. Less than three weeks later, however, Jane filed a legal petition to end their marriage after eight years on grounds of mental cruelty, a catchall phrase frequently cited as a justification in those days before no-fault divorce.

Ronnie did not attend the hearing on June 28, 1948. It was left to Jane to explain how the couple deemed so “perfect” had come apart. She wore a simple tangerine-colored shirtdress to court that day, with no hat atop her pageboy haircut, and looked more like an ordinary housewife than a movie star. “In recent months, Miss Wyman told the court, she and Reagan engaged in continual arguments on his political views. But it was not so much that she didn’t agree with him, she explained, as that she could not bring herself to display the interest he showed,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Despite her lack of interest in his political activities, Miss Wyman continued, Reagan insisted that she attend meetings with him and that she be present during discussions among his friends. But her own ideas, she complained ‘were never considered important.’ ”

Many of those discussions “were far above me,” Jane admitted.

“Finally, there was nothing in common between us,” she told Superior Court Judge Thurmond Clarke, “nothing to sustain our marriage.”

Jane gained custody of seven-year-old Maureen and three-year-old Michael, with Ronnie required to contribute $500 a month in child support. Another provision of the divorce agreement stipulated that, should Jane become ill or injured, he would have to pay an additional $500 a month in alimony. They divided $75,000 in community property.

Ronnie’s dismay over the failure of his first marriage would foster his commitment to the success of his second, as well as a kind of myopia as to the collateral damage that could occur when a couple focuses so much on each other that they shut out everyone and everything else. “He vowed, either consciously or subconsciously, when he and Nancy got married, that there was nothing that was going to separate them,” Meese observed. “I would say that a