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

Nancy was padded and wardrobed in frumpy maternity dresses that the costumer had bought at local stores for around $12.95 apiece. In those days, it was considered slightly indecent to show an expectant mother on the screen. Every outfit and camera angle had to pass muster with the Motion Picture Production Code, and the censorship office run by Joseph Breen, an arch-conservative Catholic. Nancy spent many of her off-hours with a pregnant friend, studying the way she moved. Her hair was cut into a simple bob, which she was told to wash and set herself, as Mary would do. She wore no makeup except for her own lipstick.

The Next Voice You Hear had a pre-release engagement at Radio City Music Hall—a coup for a picture that had been made with no big-name stars or lavish budget. Its leading lady got the thrill of seeing “Nancy Davis” over the movie’s title on Radio City’s famous marquee. Schary inscribed her copy of the script: “You’ll never forget this picture, and I’ll never forget you.”

She got solid reviews. Ronnie confidently told Nancy that she should unpack her bags—she would be around for a while in the movie business. (He did, however, advise her to send her wardrobe from that picture to the cleaners and lose the laundry ticket.) The studio set up a feverish promotional campaign that sent her across the country. But the earnest film, with its religious overtones, was a box-office failure in a year when moviegoers were flocking to see Annie Get Your Gun and Sunset Boulevard.

Nancy was under a truckload of stress, which stoked her chronic insecurities. The tour was grueling. Her love life was shaky, with Ronnie still dating around, and Walker battling his demons. Whatever it was she had going with Bennie Thau was coming to an end. Right around the time of her brother Dick’s late-August wedding in Chicago, Nancy landed in Passavant Hospital, where Loyal was head of surgery. Various news accounts, saved in her scrapbook, deemed her ailment a “vitamin deficiency,” an “anemic condition,” and a collapse from “nervous exhaustion.”

But she was becoming more focused on what she really wanted in life. Nancy started looking for ways to spend more time with Ronnie. One was to become more active in the Screen Actors Guild, where she was appointed to fill a vacancy on the board in August 1950. Ronnie’s constant talk about the union and its politics had driven Jane crazy, but he found a rapt audience in Nancy. By then, he had commenced his ideological journey from left to right. Ronnie was still enough of a liberal Democrat to have voted for Harry Truman in 1948, and he campaigned for actress-turned-politician Helen Gahagan Douglas against Richard Nixon for the Senate in 1950. But he was railing more and more about the Communist threat and confiscatory federal income taxes.

Ronnie and Nancy’s romance began to gain real traction. Though he still saw other women occasionally, his brother, Neil, is said to have remarked: “It looks as if this one has her hooks in him.” They largely ditched the nightclub scene. Their evenings were spent with friends; their days, at his apartment or hers. Nancy knit him socks. One movie magazine account, which Nancy pasted into her scrapbook, noted that Ronnie was behaving like “a husband-in-training,” mixing cocktails and carving the roast at her dinner parties. It added: “Wherever they are, Ronnie is talking earnestly, and Nancy is drinking in every word.”

One place they could often be found was at the home of his friend and fellow actor William Holden and Holden’s wife, Ardis, an actress who went by the professional name Brenda Marshall. Ronnie had slept on their couch for a while after his split with Jane. The Holdens thought Nancy was perfect for Ronnie and became “the godmother and godfather of that relationship,” said actress Stefanie Powers, who was Holden’s companion in his later years, after his divorce from Ardis.

Ronnie also began including Nancy in the other parts of his life. He had discovered what would become a lifelong love of horses back in the 1930s in Iowa, when he was in the US Cavalry Reserves at Fort Des Moines. Around the time he started dating Nancy, he had just bought a magnificent 360-acre ranch in Malibu Canyon. It was a vast upgrade from the 8-acre one he had previously owned in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley, and it gave him ample space for his expensive hobby raising thoroughbreds. He invited Nancy up on weekends to ride and to paint fences—not exactly her idea of a good time, but he thought it was heaven. “I knew almost nothing about riding when I first met Ronnie, but I soon realized that if I wanted to marry this man, I’d have to trade my tennis racket for a saddle,” she recalled later. “I still remember the first time he helped me up on a horse at his ranch. ‘It’s easy,’ he assured me. ‘You just show him who’s boss.’ ” She never became truly comfortable astride an enormous beast, and when they rode together, she constantly begged Ronnie to slow down.

More significantly, Ronnie let Nancy meet his children. That was a big step, and one he had not taken with anyone else he was seeing. Jane had sent Maureen and Michael to Chadwick boarding school on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, about an hour south of Los Angeles, which meant they only saw their parents every other weekend. “As far as we all knew at the time, she was the first woman in his life since Mother,” recalled Maureen, who was about ten at the time. “… Dad was so relaxed around Nancy—more relaxed than I had ever seen him.”

On the long rides to the ranch in Ronnie’s red station wagon, Nancy and