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

another factor that no doubt spurred Ronnie to finally commit to Nancy: she was pregnant. Some—including Jane, in private conversations with family members—would later claim that Ronnie was distraught and felt trapped, that he had been given no choice but to marry Nancy once he found out a baby was on the way. But to believe that requires a cynicism that overlooks the devotion that the Reagans showed to each other over the next six decades. What had stood in their way was Ronnie’s fear and reserve. Nancy’s soft persistence found a way through his emotional defenses like drops of water on a rock. As Ronnie would later write: “Nancy moved into my heart and replaced an emptiness I had been trying to ignore for a long time.”

One of the first to whom he broke the news was his friend William Holden. Ronnie passed a note during a long, boring session of the Motion Picture Industry Council, where he and the Sunset Boulevard star were representing the Screen Actors Guild. It said: “To hell with this, how would you like to be the best man when I marry Nancy?”

“It’s about time!” Holden blurted out, and the two of them walked out of the meeting.

The newly engaged couple also called Edie and Loyal, who had never met Ronnie in person and were only vaguely aware that he and Nancy were getting serious. According to Nancy, her parents were thrilled when Ronnie asked Loyal’s permission to marry his daughter. That Ronnie would do things in such an old-fashioned way “only endeared him to me more,” Nancy said. Her stepbrother, Dick, remembered it differently. He was a Northwestern medical resident at the time, with strict rules that he was not to have outside disturbances when he was on duty. No one would have understood that better than his physician father. So, Dick was surprised when Loyal paged him at the hospital and ordered him to come over for dinner.

“He was absolutely furious that Nancy had not told him and Edith that she was going to marry. He was extremely upset,” Dick told me. The decision had been presented to Nancy’s parents as a fait accompli. Their wedding would take place in less than two weeks. It is not clear whether Nancy’s parents were told about her pregnancy, and they may have been concerned about the fact that Ronnie was divorced. But whatever other objections Loyal might have had about his daughter’s precipitous decision, he also felt a sense of betrayal. As Dick put it, Loyal “felt a closeness to her that she violated. He would expect a child of his to inform him that she was going to do this, make this important step.”

Or perhaps what bothered Loyal was that another man had supplanted him as the center of Nancy’s universe.

CHAPTER FIVE

Nancy might have liked a big wedding, but Ronnie put his foot down. He refused to stage a lavish production for the Hollywood gossip queens to hyperventilate over in their columns. Ronnie had seen how the make-believe machine could confect gauzy visions of future bliss. He had seen how real-life could blow those dreams to bits. His one concession to the media interest in their nuptials was to allow newspaper photographers to snap him and Nancy applying for their marriage license in Santa Monica, two days after MGM announced their engagement on February 27, 1952. In the photo, Ronnie looks annoyed. He would later regret denying Nancy a chance to come down a church aisle on a cloud of white lace with everyone they knew present and wishing them well. “Came our wedding day, and not one protest from Nancy over the fact that I cheated her out of the ceremony every girl deserves. It is hard for me to look back and realize the extent to which I was ruled by my obsession about the press and the fuss that would accompany a regular wedding. I can only confess that at the time to even contemplate facing reporters and flashbulbs made me break out in a cold sweat,” he wrote.

On March 4 Nancy donned a gray wool suit with a white collar that she had found on the rack at the upscale department store I. Magnin. Atop her head, she sported a perky little flowered hat, which had a bit of net veiling. Around her neck was the strand of pearls her parents had given her for her debut. She looked like she might be going to a Junior League luncheon rather than to her own wedding. The ensemble could hardly have been more different from the ice-blue satin, sable-accessorized gown that Jane had worn like a princess a dozen years earlier.

Ronnie picked Nancy up at her apartment. He brought her a bouquet of orange blossoms, her favorite. His mother, her parents, and his children were not invited to their ceremony at the Little Brown Church, a Disciples of Christ sanctuary in the San Fernando Valley. The only witnesses were Bill and Ardis Holden. The exchange of vows was over so quickly that Nancy didn’t realize they were married until Bill asked to be the first to kiss the new Mrs. Reagan. Nor in her euphoric daze did she notice that Bill and Ardis were sitting on opposite sides of the chapel, not speaking to each other because they had just had a big argument.

Had Ardis not thought to arrange for a photographer, there would have been no visual record of the day. She also had a tiered wedding cake waiting back at the Holden home in Toluca Lake. The Reagans spent their wedding night at the Mission Inn in Riverside, where Ronnie carried Nancy over the threshold of a room bedecked with red roses. From there they went to Phoenix for a quick two-day honeymoon at the Biltmore, much of which was spent in the company of Nancy’s parents.

Ronnie was a hit with the Davises. He was intimidated at first by Loyal, but